From: Echoes of the Past
Segment 1: Of the Summons at the Guild’s High Hall
Herken, ye gentils all, and hold ye still, For I shal telle, with ful yvel wil And hevy herte, how on a morwe gray The Guild his summoneres sente that day. By Helios’ first and palest rising beam, Ere yet the cokkes cried, ere yet the dreme Of honest folk was from their eyelids shaken, Were fyve of us from fyve soft beddes taken.
I, Aldric, cleped Thornebane of the Veil, Was ferst to rise, for lytel do I ayl The comyng of the dawn. Myn eyen are dym, And sleep hath long forgot the way to him That sittes by candle till the candle dies And reades what no prudent man espies. Myn cowl was on my shulders, my quill in hond, Whan at my chamber-dore there came a pond- Pond, pond, thre sharpe knockes, cold and keen, As though the knocker knew what I had seen.
The boy was yong, the boy was scarse fourteen, His lyveree sylver-grey, his vissage clene But pale, ful pale, as though he too had been Awake through hours no yonker sholde kene. He helde a vellum folded thries and seeled With waxen roundel, red as bloode congealed, And on that seel, impressed with nayl of iren, The Guild’s device: a tower and a wyren.
“Brother,” quod he, “the Clerk awaiteth thee At Guild’s High Hall, with alle expedience. Come thou in ful scholarly sobrience, And bring thy toom, thy quill, thy sharpest wit, For thou hast ben of fyve the foremost writ.”
The foremost writ. I marked the phrase. I marked How the boy’s eyen toward the stayres-head harked As though he feared a second-coming knock And wolde be gone before the matins-clock. I asked him naught. He wolde have answered naught. Some summonses are best by silence sought.
I donned my greyest pilgrim’s cloke, and tooke My candle-stub, my rosarie, my booke, My quill whos ink hath never seene a drouth, And stepped into the strete. The cold of south Was on the air, the wrong cold for the tyme, A cold that tasteth lyke a borrowed rhyme From some older winter than this yeer hath known. The cobbles gleamed lyke tethe of some dead crone.
Now shal I telle, gentil reader mine, How four besydes me walked that morwe-line Toward the Guild’s High Hall, each summoned forth By lyveree-boye from south and eest and north And weste, fyve radii of a circle drawn Upon a mappe I had not then seen drawn. This knewe I not at first. I learned it after. But even then, the quiet streetes brought laughter Nowhere, and Helios did not fully ryse, And fog lay thicke upon the buttress-eyes Of every spire, and every dog did sleep, And every shutter closed its counsel keep.
The Guild’s High Hall is builded of grey stoon, With seven towers and a bell-roof, and a throon Of dais-marble where the Masters sit Whan gret affaires demaund their full wit. But on this morwe was the dais bare. Only the Clerk, Goodman Emeric Fayre, Sat at his lang oak desk, his taper lit, His spectacles upon his nose-bridge slit, His vellum-stack before him, and his quill Moving, moving, though the hall was still.
I was the ferst to enter. I bowed lowe. He raised his eyes. He did not smyle, nor show The custom courtesies that Clerkes kepe For men of coin. He looked as men who slepe Not enough, nor well, nor soone, nor late, And somwhat-knowing dread was in his gate.
“Brother Thornebane,” quod he. “Sit ye doun. The others come. We speke when all are boun.”
I sat. I waited. In the silence hung The sound of distaunt bells not rightly rung, The half-beat where the ringer’s hand had slipped, Or where the ringer’s wrist had not been gripped With full conviction. Somewhat was amiss, And Emeric Fayre knew well it was amiss.
The second came. Ysolde of the Fern, Her copper braid yet damp from morning-burn Of hurried washing, her greene vest but half Laced at the shulder, her moss-eyes of chaff- Gold flickered with the glad good-morrow she Gave to the Clerk, and to myself, and me She greeted as a stranger but with warmth, For so she greeteth all of mortal form. “A fine grey morwe for quests,” quod she, and laughed, But laughter died upon the Clerk’s slow draught Of breath, who did not ryse, nor speke, but pointed To a bench where she sat, slightly disjointed.
The third came soone thereafter, Balthazar, Whos skin is salt-kissed and whos eyen ar The color of a knyf laid long in rain. He grumbled as he entered, of the paine Of walking ere the sun was rightly up, Of lack of ale, of lack of brekefast-sup, Of tolls he had been charged at yester-gate, Of fees, of taxes, of the turning fate Of honest seamen brought to lande-based grief. Yet for all his grumbling, his relief Was plaine to see when he beheld our faces, For Balthazar, though he conceal the traces, Doth ever prefer company to none, And more the company of fyve than one.
The ferthe: Seraphine of Valmont-Lissaire, Came through the doore as water through the aire, Noyseless, gliding, her plumb silkes dark as wyne, Her raven hair as sharpe as any syne Of judgement drawn. She did not speke at entry. She gave the Clerk a nod of cool affrontry, Assessed the hall in one slow-sweeping glaunce, Marked every doore and every window’s chaunce Of exit, and then sat with hands composed Upon her lap, three porcelain masks enclosed About her throat on sylver chaines of grace. She met myne eye and gave a half a face Of recognition, as if knowing me From some old courtly whisper’s legacy. Perhaps she did. I have been writ of, lately.
The fyft: Old Tobin, amblying statelly With kettle on his back, and cap askew, And beard that reached his belt, his cheekes bedew With frost of morwe. He greeted every one Of us by name, though we had yet begun No introductions. This I marked also. Old Tobin knoweth things he need not knowe. He sat beside Ysolde, patted her hand, And said, “Weel, lass, it’s sooner than we planned.” She looked at him bewildered. He just smiled, And from his coat produced a piece of wyled Dried apple, and bit into it, content, As though a dawn-time summoning were meant For naught but picnicking. Yet even he, I marked, did keep one watchful weather-eye Upon the Clerk, who had not yet begun.
Five were we gathered. Helios had not yet run His fingers lang enough into the hall To chase the shadow from the furthest wall. The Clerk rose up. He crossed to bolt the dore. He turned the iren key. He turned it more Than once, as though one turn might not suffice To keep the morwe out, nor to keep us nice And sealed within. He came back to his desk. He cleared his throat. His manner was grotesque In its precision, lyke a man who feared That any untrimmed word might be ensneared And turned against him by some listening wall.
“Good folk,” he said. “Ye have ben called. Ye all Have seen the seel of Guild upon the note That brought ye hence. Ye are a chosen cote Of fyve, for fyve the number is required By ancient precedent, by seers inquired, By that which long the Guild’s own records show. Ye come to take a quest. Before ye go, There is some speke which must be plainly said, And more which must be said when all is read. Attend.”
He took from his high desk a scroll Tied up with corde of seven-knotted soul- Hemp, which is used for writs of solemnest grade. He loosed the knots. He laid the scroll displayed Upon the desk. I leaned to read. My eyes, Though dym, can read a Writ of Questing’s guise At fyve-and-twenty paces. This was that. I knew the hand. I knew the heaviness of the fat Vellum. I knew the purple ink reserved For quests which toucheth upon things preserved Too long, and now must be disturbed.
He read:
“To Brother Aldric Thornebane of the Veil, To Mistress Ysolde Kerrigan of Dale, To Master Balthazar Vex of the Twy-Drowned Weir, To Madame Seraphine de Valmont-Lissaire, To Goodman Tobin Whittlehouse, the Kettlebearer: Hail.
“The Guild hath called ye forth, fyve stout and hale, To journey to the place that was forsooke, Whereof the seventh chapter in the booke Of Chronicles doth tell, and called the Vale. There lies an artefact beyond the pale Of common magic, holding in its core A key to understanding the long-lore Of that great elder people, fallen doun These manye thousand yeres, to silence boun. Retrieve it. Bring it whole. Relinquish it Unto the Guild for study and for writ Of safe-kepynge. The reward, sevenhundred Fyfty peeces gold, a bracelet gundred With powers of magic construct-apprehension, And such renoun as may befall attention In times to come. The quest is dangerous. The Guild doth not dissemble. Perilous Are the spectral guardians that still watch The artefact, and more, the old latch Of ritual work required for its revelation. Ye shal need coordination, concentration, Magic, and mettle. Ye shal need each other. This is the quest.”
He folded it, and brother, I saw his hande do tremble. Just a beat. Just once. As though the writ itself were heat Too warm to hold. He folded it again. He set it doun.
And then the Clerk did strain Toward us across the desk, and his voice dropped To that low octave where the truth is propped Upon the edge of whisper, and his eyen Swept doore and window, seeking any spyen, And finding none, he spake. And I, who make It myne affaire to weigh each word men take From out their secret throats, I marked him well. I mark him still. I writ him doun, to tell.
“There is,” quod he, “a thing ye should be tolde That is not writ in any scroll of golde, Nor spoken at the Masters’ formal session, Nor set doun in the recent Guild confession Of quests undertaken. I am old in this chair. I have seen writs come and go. I do not share What I shal share now lightly. Hearken close.”
He took a breath. The candle-taper rose A little higher, as though it too did listen.
“The artefact,” quod he, “the artefact, I christen With no certainty of name, but I was told- By whom it matters not, by one grown old In service to the Guild, now two yeres cold- That what the seventh chapter doth unfold Is but the outer skin. That at the core Of what is bidden ye retrieve, there’s more Than study. That the ritual ye shal perform May not reveal, but bind. May not conform To any purpose which was openly Avowed in guild-meet. That some company Of Masters know this, and have chosen silence, And have designed this quest with such alliance Between their spoken word and what’s unspoken That the unspoken part remaineth unbroken Until ye are too deep within the Vale To turn about. I cannot tell the tale Of who told me, nor how, nor swear its truth. But I am old, good folk, and not uncouth In weighing men. I think the telling true. I think the Guild may be asking of you A thing it has not named. I think ye should Be careful. I think ye should be understood To carry to the Vale not just the writ, But also doubt, and keep it closely knit Within your mental gestalt’s bosom-fold. That is my counsel. That is what I’m told. I tell ye at the risk of my own place. Do with it what thy consciences embrace.”
He stopped. He sat. He looked doun at his hands. The hall was very still. Outside, no bands Of morning market-criers yet had come. Inside, no whisper. Only the sweet hum Of candle-wick, and the slow breath of fyve Souls hearing something not designed to thrive In speech.
I looked upon my companions’ faces. I saw each one receive the word, and traces Of a thousand thoughts moved through them, each In his or her own manner of the speech The soul doth speak to itself. Ysolde’s mouth Set firm. Her eyen flashed, not fear, but drouth Of patience with deceivers. Balthazar Muttered beneath his breath, “Aye, so they are, So they ever are, so they ever shal be, Balthazar said it, Balthazar did see.” And Seraphine, most still of all, composed Her handes upon her lap, and then disclosed The merest lift of eyebrow, the merest signe Of confirmation, as though the Clerk’s dark line Had met a shadow-line already drawn Within her mind, and made therefrom the dawn Of a long strategy. Old Tobin sighed, A grandfather’s sigh, lang-suffering, applied To many such unfolding weary tales. He murmured, “Mm. I thought it mought be thus. The old ones often hide a thing from us In plaine sight, and call it prudence.” Then he took Another bite of apple from his book- Pocket, and chewed it slowly, and looked sad.
And I, Aldric, the chronicler, I had The keenest knowing of us all, perhaps, For in my tome, through many midnight laps Of candle-oil, I had traced the seventh spire Of Chronicles, and found the Chaucer’d fyre Of Middle English verse, and marked withal How in the stanzas there did always fall A double-meaning, such that what was said Of seeking artefacts was also read Of binding them. “In shadows’ heart, the truth concealed.” The truth. Not the reward. Not the revealed Object of hunt. The truth. Concealed in shadow. Who hides a truth in shadow? Not the fellow Who seeks to study. He who seeks to guard. Or, I now thought, he who seeks to discard By binding. The ritual. The rite. And ye a naysayer to me? By Ilmatus’ light, The ritual is the quest. The artefact Is but the lure. The guild wolde have us pact With something, bind with something, cap with seel Some ancient-risen thing that doth reveal Itself in threatening pulses when the Vale’s Dim crystal heart thrums once in fyvefold yales Of centuries. I saw it then. I saw The seventh chapter plain beneath its law Of rhyme and rhythm. And my herte did sink.
The Clerk unrolled the mappe. A fyvefold link Of hills and forrests and a barren vale, With marks of danger, and a lettered trail Of waystations. He pointed where we should Journey, by which pass, through which dim wood, To reach the Vale’s mouth in a fortnight’s time. He gave us each a wryt of lesser rime For use with guild-approved suppliers, and stressed That it was no free gift, but must be dressed In earnedness of later service’s due. He gave us each a copy of the view Of map, hand-copied, seeled. He gave to me, Aldric, the master-copy, and to see My eyen receive it he did nod, as though Confirming that the chronicler sholde go With fullest access to the mapped affaire. He gave to Ysolde a listing of the rare Herbs found along the route. To Balthazar, The listing of the rivers we should par Upon our way, and which were forded best. To Seraphine, a scroll of some arrest- Warrants which might in travel be of use, Granting her authority to loose Certain small favors from local constabulairy. To Tobin, nothing writ, but sanctuary Assured in any guild-house, should the road Go worse than planned.
He gave, and then he showed Us to the inner dore, which he unbolted With slower hand than the outer. He revolted, I think, at what he had said, and what he had Not said. He was a guild-man. He was sad. He tooke my hand at parting. He helde it A beat too lang. He said, “If thou canst knit A tale, good brother, of what ye find therein, Write it in truth. Write it in truth. The sin Is not the writing. The sin is the silence. I am too old to break the larger reticence, But thou art not. Record. Record. Record.” He released my hand. I bowed. I gave my word.
We fyve emerged from out the High Hall’s shade Into the risen light. The market-trade Had wakened up. The streetes were full of crie Of vendor, cart, and child, as though the why Of morwe had been restored. We stood a moment On the broad stone stayre. No fyve-fold comment Was needed. We had heard. We had the same Knowing. We would speake it by its name Soon, at some quieter place. But for a while, We stood, and let the ordinary style Of city-life come back about our feet Like water risen to a waylaid cleat.
Ysolde spake ferst. She said, “I’ve horses boun At Morning Rose. We’ll need a steadier hound Of company than speech can give us here. Let’s ride an houre. Then we’ll speke more clear.” We nodded. We agreed. We went our way Toward the stables, fyve in fyve-fold array, Each mantled with the knowing newly given, Each gait a little heavier, a little driven, Each thought a little further ben than mouth Would carry openly. The cold of south Was lifting from the stones. The bells rang true Now, straight and clean. The morwe was replete with new And ordinary noise. And yet, and yet, I felt, beneath the noyse, a fyne-spun net Of prophecy, and caught within its strings The fyvefold shape of us, and flutterings Of that which in the Vale awaited, calm, Patient, and old, and needing no alarm.
And I, Aldric, who ever trust the pen Above the sword, above the tongue of men, Did knowe this truth, and know it stil today: That we were summoned not to find, but weigh. Not to retrieve, but to decide. Not bind A thing, but look the binding in its mind And ask of it what thing had brought it there, And whether it desired the binding’s share, Or freedom, or some stranger third degree Of outcome that the Masters failed to see. The quest was not the quest. The quest was us. And thus beginneth, gentils, what’s most thus.
So closeth I the proem of this tome. Ye shal have more. The road from hence to home Is lang, is full of witnesses and woe, Is full of fyres both fresh and long ago Extinguished and rekindled. I shal write it. I have sworn it to the Clerk. I shal not fight it Though it cost me my cowl, my quill, my peace. The chronicle beginnes. It shal not cease Till all the shadowed truth of Vale is known, And every ancient whispered secret shown, And every guardian laid to honest rest, And every companion’s heart made manifest. I am Aldric. I am the Veil. I am the pen. Turn, gentil reader, to the page again.
Segment 2: The Measuring of Companions at the Copper Kettle
Now I will tell you straight, friend, and I won’t dress it up in velvet the way a Clerk dresses up a writ, because a man my age has earned the right to say a thing the way it happened and let the listener make his own arrangements with it. We had come out of the Guild’s High Hall with a load of trouble tucked under our arms like a goose a poacher hopes nobody’s counted, and Ysolde — bless her, she was the first to have a practical notion — she’d said we ought to ride an hour and then speak more clear. Well, we rode the hour. And when the hour was up, and we’d put a comfortable piece of countryside between ourselves and that bell-roofed stone heap of a Hall, I said, quiet-like, that I knew a place.
I always know a place. It is the particular curse and blessing of a man who has spent upwards of seventy years wandering about with a kettle on his back that he is acquainted with every tavern, cookhouse, way-stop, and respectable widow’s kitchen between the Copper Coast and the Sapphire Sound. If you drop me blindfolded onto any road with more than three houses on it, I will smell my way to a bowl of stew inside of twenty minutes, and I will know the cook’s mother’s maiden name inside of thirty. This is not a boast. It is, if anything, an affliction. My wife — rest her — used to say that I had the soul of a small dog and the stomach of a large one, and there is truth in it.
The place I knew was called the Copper Kettle, which you might think an awkward coincidence given my own cargo, but I assure you I had nothing to do with the naming, and neither did anybody’s grandmother. The sign out front was a copper kettle beaten out of an old coin-pot by a blacksmith who owed the previous proprietor a favor, and it hung crooked on one hinge in a way that has hung crooked, to my certain knowledge, for forty-one years. The tavern sat just off the river road, half an hour’s easy ride from the city gate, tucked back under a stand of old oaks that kept it cool in summer and secret in winter. The current proprietor was a woman named Brigid Ostler, who had married into the name and then made the name her own by main force, and she kept a clean floor, a clean pot, and a clean mouth, and I loved her like a niece, although she was in no way any relation of mine.
We tied the horses. Ysolde saw to them — she would not have let any of the rest of us near those horses if we had been carrying her own firstborn, and she was right — and the rest of us ducked under the lintel, which is lower than it looks, and I will tell you who ducked and who didn’t, and what it told me.
Brother Aldric ducked. He ducked further than he needed to, because he is a tall man and he has spent so much time in low-ceilinged libraries and crypts and pilgrim-holds that he ducks on general principle, the way a man who has been bitten by a dog once will flinch when any dog comes near a door. He ducked, and he took off his cowl, and he folded his hands in front of him, and he stood just inside the entry like a schoolboy waiting to be told where to sit. That told me a great deal about Brother Aldric. A man who has been in many rooms does not pick his own seat. He waits. He watches. He waits some more. And when he does sit, he sits with his back near a wall and his eyes on the door.
Balthazar did not duck. Balthazar is a short fellow, and the lintel was no matter to him, but the principle is this: some men, when they enter a low door, make a great show of how it is nothing to them, and Balthazar was one of these. He marched in with his chin slightly up, as if daring the lintel to take a swing at him, and he inspected the room with the slow sweeping eye of a man who is pricing the furniture. I saw him mark the exits — front door, back door, the window behind the bar that was latched but not locked, the hatch in the ceiling that led up to the hay-loft — and I saw him mark the number of patrons, which was four, and the quality of their boots, which told him whether they were local farmers (they were) or possible trouble (they were not), and I saw him settle, finally, on the assessment that he was safe enough to be miserable in comfort. He then announced, as he pulled out a stool, that he was in desperate need of small beer, and in slightly less desperate need of cheese, and if there were any smoked fish in the back he would consider paying coin for it, though he would not consider paying much.
Ysolde came in last from the yard, smelling of horse and clean sweat, and she ducked the lintel without noticing she had ducked it, and she greeted Brigid Ostler like they had known each other all their lives, though they had not. Ysolde greets everybody like that. It is a kind of magic, or maybe it is just a kind of politeness so well-practiced it passes for magic. Brigid warmed to her in about two seconds and was showing her the new litter of kittens in the pantry in about four, and I nearly had to fetch Ysolde out by the elbow to get her to sit down and eat, because once she gets into a pantry with kittens there is no accounting for when she might emerge.
Seraphine entered with the slow deliberation of a woman who has decided in advance that she will not appear to be looking at anything, and is therefore, of course, looking at everything. She did not duck. She did not have to. But she inclined her head, just slightly, in the precise amount required to pass beneath the lintel without touching it, which is its own form of ducking, the kind practiced by people who have grown up in houses with doorframes carved by sculptors. She had traded her city silks for a traveling cloak of plum wool, sensible and well-cut, but even the sensible wool sat on her like silk, because some people cannot wear anything that does not look expensive. She took in the room in one pass — I watched her do it, and I admired the craft — and she settled on a table in the corner where she could see the door and the bar and the hatch in the ceiling and the window behind the bar, and she sat with her back to the one direction nobody could approach her from, which was the wall. I have met spies, and I have met courtiers, and I have met one or two assassins in my time, and Seraphine moved like a woman who had been all three.
As for me — well, I didn’t duck. I am not tall. I am not short, neither, but the lintel of the Copper Kettle has been at a comfortable eyebrow’s clearance above my cap for four decades, and we have an understanding. I came in, I set the kettle down by the hearth where it belonged, I clapped Brigid on the shoulder, I asked after her boy Dermid (he had just been apprenticed to a cooper in the next valley, she was proud and sad about it, as mothers are), and I got the use of her back-hearth for an hour in exchange for the promise of leaving enough stew behind to feed the kitchen-help. She knew my terms and I knew hers. We dealt quickly. Then I rolled up my sleeves, and I went to work.
Now, cooking for strangers is not the same as cooking for family, and cooking for people you are about to walk into death with is not the same as either. There is a thing you do, when you cook for people you are measuring. You watch them while the pot is on. You let the smell of the broth draw them in, because the smell of a good broth will tell you everything about a person if you know how to read the tells. A man who walks toward the smell without thinking is a man who trusts his nose. A man who holds back and waits for someone else to approach the pot first is a man who has been poisoned before, or has poisoned somebody. A woman who leans over the pot and closes her eyes is a woman who was fed well as a child, and remembers it. A woman who leans over the pot and smiles without closing her eyes is a woman who was not fed well as a child, and remembers that.
I chopped. I browned. I added the onions, and the carrots from Ysolde’s saddlebags that she had bought at the gate-market on the way out, and I added the last of my own good dried mushrooms that I had been saving for an occasion, and I judged that this was an occasion. I added salt. I added thyme. I added a splash of dark beer that Brigid handed me without asking. I watched.
Ysolde came to the pot first, as I knew she would. She came and she stood beside me, and she didn’t say anything for a long moment, and then she said, “My gran made a stew like that. She used parsnip, though.” I said I had no parsnip, and I was sorry for it, and she said she’d bring parsnip next time. Next time. She had only known me since the hour before dawn, and she had already decided there would be a next time of stewmaking between us. That told me Ysolde operates on a principle of forward trust. She extends her hand first and corrects later. That is a dangerous principle in the world, and it is the principle that keeps a party alive when the party is good, and gets a party killed when the party is bad. She is going to be either our saving grace or the first of us to fall, and I made a note in the old Tobin ledger to keep half an eye on her at all times without letting her see me do it.
Balthazar came to the pot second. He did not come for the pot. He came, ostensibly, for a refill of his small beer, but he came by way of the pot, and he lingered at the pot, and he gave it a long suspicious look of a man who is trying to determine whether the cook is a murderer. Then he grunted. Then he said, and I quote, “I hate mushrooms. Unless they’re good mushrooms. Are those good mushrooms?” I said they were my last good mushrooms, which I had been saving. He grunted again. Then he said, “I’ll have some,” which from Balthazar was practically a declaration of love. Then he turned and went back to his stool, and he sat on it heavily, and he took a long drink of his small beer, and he muttered into the mug — I have learned to read Balthazar’s mutters — “Balthazar doesn’t like new people. Balthazar never has. Balthazar isn’t going to start now. But Balthazar will eat the stew.” That told me what I needed to know about Balthazar. He is a man who announces he will not be charmed, and is charmed immediately, and is furious about it for the rest of his life. That kind of man will die for you on a Tuesday and complain about it on a Wednesday, and if you have one in your party you are lucky, and you had better treat him well. I resolved to slip him the biggest piece of sausage when I served out the bowls.
Brother Aldric did not come to the pot. He came to the hearth, which is adjacent to the pot but not the same thing. He stood at a respectful distance, and he warmed his hands, and he studied the pot from an angle, the way a scholar studies a codex he has not been given permission to touch. I took pity on him after a minute. I said, “Brother, the pot don’t bite.” He smiled — he has a good smile, Aldric does, though he doesn’t use it much — and he said, “Forgive me, Goodman Whittlehouse. I was raised in a house where approaching the cookpot uninvited was the quickest way to a rapped knuckle.” I said I was sorry for his knuckles. He said they had healed. I said I would call him when the stew was ready, and he should sit and rest, and he did, and he sat with his back near the wall and his eyes on the door, exactly as I had predicted.
Now, you understand, I was running two conversations in my head the whole time. There was the surface conversation — the chopping, the seasoning, the light exchange of pleasantries — and then there was the undercurrent, which was this: these four people are about to walk with me into a ruin that will try to kill us all, and before the sun sets I need to know who among them will break first, who will break last, who will steal food when food runs short, who will give up their water to a stranger, who will lie to protect the group, who will lie to protect themselves, and who will look at me when the moment comes and ask me what to do. That last one is the most important. In every good party there is always one who, at the critical moment, turns to somebody else and says — without saying it — tell me what to do. And it is a dreadful thing to be the person they turn to, and it is worse if there isn’t one. If nobody turns, the party dies.
Seraphine did not come to the pot at all. She sat in her corner, and she ordered wine from Brigid in a voice so low and polite that Brigid actually curtseyed, which Brigid has not done for anyone since the Viscount of Pennywhistle Hollow stopped in back during the bad winter of some year I cannot be bothered to remember. Seraphine received her wine. She took one sip. She set it down. She did not drink any more of it for the next forty minutes, and she did not eat any of the bread that Brigid brought, and she did not acknowledge the presence of food in the world at all until I personally set a bowl of stew in front of her and said, “Madame, I would take it as a personal kindness if you ate some of this, because I cooked it for five and I cannot bring a bowl back to the kitchen with a clear conscience.” She looked at me. I will say this for Seraphine: she looks at you. A great many people in this world glance at you. They flick their eyes over you and away. Seraphine looks at you the way a jeweler looks at a stone that may or may not be paste. It is not a comfortable look. But it is an honest look. She looked at me, and she weighed me, and I felt, quite distinctly, the moment her scale settled and the moment she decided I was not paste. Then she picked up her spoon. Then she ate. She ate slowly, a small measured mouthful at a time, and she did not speak while she ate, and she did not make any sound with the spoon, and when she was done she set the spoon down on the rim of the bowl at exactly the angle she had picked it up. The bowl was clean. Not empty. Clean. There is a difference. She had eaten as if the stew were a piece of a puzzle that needed to be removed from the table one fragment at a time so that the table could be used for something else.
And she had watched the door. The whole time she was eating, she was watching the door. Not obviously. Not constantly. Just at intervals, the way a lighthouse watches the sea. Every forty or fifty seconds, a glance, brief, pass, return. The door. The door. The door. I do not know whom Seraphine was expecting. But I know she was expecting somebody. And I know she had been expecting somebody for a long time, because you don’t develop a watch like that in a week.
Brother Aldric, I should say, also watched the door. But his watching was different. Seraphine watched like a person who expects an enemy. Aldric watched like a person who expects a messenger. Every time the latch rattled — and in a tavern the latch rattles about every three minutes, because somebody is always coming or going — his eyes would lift, and his hand would go to the inside pocket of his cloak where he kept his pilgrim’s tome, and then he would settle again. He was waiting for news. He did not know he was waiting for news. But somewhere in the back of his scholarly brain, the Clerk’s parting words — record, record, record — had lit a small lantern, and that lantern was burning now, and it would burn for the rest of this business, and maybe for the rest of his life.
Ysolde watched the door exactly once, in the whole time we were in the Copper Kettle, and it was when Brigid’s fat orange cat came strolling in with a dead mouse in its teeth, and Ysolde said, “Oh, well done, you,” and the cat took this as an invitation and came over and dropped the mouse at Ysolde’s feet as a present. Ysolde laughed — and here is the part I want you to mark — Ysolde laughed too loud. Not ugly-loud. Not forced-loud. Just slightly louder than the moment called for, a full-throated surprised peal of laughter that carried all the way out to the stable yard, and I watched the four locals in the corner look up at her, and I watched them smile, all four of them, involuntarily, because Ysolde’s laugh is a thing that will make a funeral smile. And I thought: there it is. There is her tell. When Ysolde is frightened, she laughs. When Ysolde is moved, she laughs. When Ysolde doesn’t know what to do, she laughs, and her laugh is loud enough to fill the space where her not-knowing-what-to-do would otherwise show. That is a valuable tell, if you’re her friend. It is a dangerous tell, if you’re her enemy. Because her enemy will hear that laugh and think she is off her guard, and her enemy will be wrong. Ysolde laughs loudest when she is most present.
Balthazar, for his part, did not laugh at all. Balthazar does not laugh. He makes a sound in his chest that is somewhere between a cough and a chuckle, and he makes it when somebody says something he thinks is foolish, and it is the Balthazarian equivalent of a standing ovation. He made that sound twice during the stew: once when Aldric tried to explain to him the historical origin of the word “fork” (Balthazar does not care about the historical origin of words and considers all scholarship a waste of time, though he has, I am nearly certain, read more books than he will ever admit), and once when Seraphine, apropos of nothing, said, “The wine is better than I expected.” The second chuckle-cough was because Balthazar had been thinking exactly the same thing and had been too proud to say it.
So I measured them, friend. I measured them while I ladled out the stew and while they ate it and while the fire popped and while Brigid’s cat finished off the mouse under Ysolde’s bench and licked its paws and fell asleep in a patch of sun on the floor. I measured them, and here is what I got, and I will tell you plain, because you deserve plain.
Aldric is a man who has seen too much written down and too little lived, and he is going on this journey because the Clerk told him to record, and because some part of him has been waiting all his life to be told to record something that mattered. He will be brave in the way a lamplighter is brave: steady, unshowy, and absolutely refusing to leave any corner dark. He will also, I suspect, be the one who breaks first when the moral weight of what we are doing becomes clear, and he will break not because he is weak but because he is the only one of us who truly understands, in the scholar’s way, what a binding is and what it costs to perform one.
Ysolde is the heart. You always need a heart. A party without a heart is a gang. She will feed us, she will tend the horses, she will laugh when we need laughter, and she will — and I mark this, I mark this carefully — she will carry a grief we do not yet know about, and at some point that grief will walk up to her in the ruins and shake her hand, and she will have to decide what to do with it in front of all of us. I do not envy her that moment. I will try to be standing near her when it comes.
Balthazar is the spine. He will not say he is the spine. He will complain that his back hurts. But when the pressure comes, he will not bend, and he will not break, and he will pretend the whole time that he is about to do both. He will also, I think, be the one who sees through the Guild’s lies fastest, because he has spent his life being lied to by every captain, harbormaster, and customs officer between here and the deep trenches, and his ear is tuned for it. When the moment comes to call out the guild’s deception, it will be Balthazar’s mutter that names it first.
Seraphine is the knife. And I do not mean that coldly. A knife is a good thing to have, if you respect it. She will see three moves ahead of the rest of us. She will have contingency plans for her contingency plans. She will, at some point, do something that looks like betrayal and will turn out, upon closer examination, to be the only thing that kept us all alive. We will misunderstand her for the first half of this journey and we will trust her absolutely by the end, and she will not forgive any of us for the first half, but she will love us silently for the second. And somewhere, somewhere behind those amber eyes, there is a person she is waiting for at that door, and if that person ever walks through it, I do not know what Seraphine will become. I hope I am nearby when she becomes it.
And me. Old Tobin. What am I, in this party? I am the kettle. I am the hearth. I am the one who remembers the names of the dogs in every village we pass through. I am the grandfather who has been grandfather to three generations of adventurers already and will, gods willing, be grandfather to a fourth. I am the one who sees the shape of things early, and who says very little about it, and who keeps his counsel close because a grandfather who tells everything he knows is not a grandfather, he is a gossip. I am, if it comes to it, the one who will make the hardest decision for us, because the others will look at each other and not be able to decide, and then they will look at me, and I will have already decided, and I will tell them, and they will be grateful and they will never thank me, which is the correct bargain.
I served the stew. We ate it. We talked a little, and not a lot. Brigid came by with bread and went away again. The cat slept. The fire popped. The four locals in the corner paid their tab and left, one by one, and nobody was left in the Copper Kettle but us and Brigid and the sleeping cat and the sun moving slowly across the floor.
And then, when the bowls were down, and the bread was down, and the wine was down, I set my hands flat on the table and I said, “All right. Now. About what the Clerk told us.” And four faces turned toward me, and I saw — I saw it plainly — the small moment of turning-toward that I had been waiting for. Each of them, in their own way, looked at me and waited for me to say the thing next. Even Seraphine. Even Balthazar. Aldric, of course. Ysolde, of course. But even the knife and even the spine turned their faces, just slightly, toward the old fool with the kettle, and gave him the floor.
I have been a grandfather too long to flinch from that. I took the floor.
“We’ve been told a true thing by a scared man,” I said, “and the true thing is that this quest is not what it says on the writ. Now, each of us heard it, and each of us will have thought about it in our own way on the ride out here. I’m not going to tell you what to think. I’m going to ask each of you, one at a time, starting with whoever wants to start, what you think we should do about it. And I’ll listen. And then I’ll say what I think. And then we’ll decide. And then we’ll either ride on together, or some of us will peel off and go home, and there’ll be no shame in either, because nobody gets into this kind of business by signing a writ without reading the back of it, and we’ve just been shown the back of it.”
Nobody spoke for a long moment. And then Balthazar, of course, muttered — “Balthazar wants it on the record that Balthazar doesn’t trust Guilds.” And Ysolde snorted, a good clean snort, and said, “Consider it on the record.” And Aldric, very quietly, said, “I have already sworn to the Clerk that I will record this journey truly, regardless of what the Guild wishes recorded. I will go forward. The question is in what spirit, and toward what outcome.” And Seraphine, after a long pause in which she turned the stem of her wine-cup one quarter-turn and then another quarter-turn, said, in her cool continental voice, “I will go. I would like to know what they are binding, and why, and whether I agree with the binding. I will decide at the ritual’s edge and not before.” And Ysolde, who had been last because she had been listening to all of us, said simply, “I’m in. I don’t like liars. And if there’s a thing in that Vale that’s being bound against its will, I’d like a vote in the binding.”
And I looked at each of them, one by one, and I saw — and I will tell you this plain, friend, because I have seen many parties form and most of them were worse than this one — I saw a party. Not a gang. Not a crew. A party. Five souls who had sat down strangers and stood up something else. Not friends yet. Friendship takes longer than one pot of stew. But bonded. Provisional. Aimed in the same direction, each for their own good reason, each carrying their own weight, each willing to look the other four in the eye and say I’m in.
I said, “Then we ride at first light. We’ll sleep here tonight — Brigid has beds, I’ve already asked — and we’ll leave before the city wakes, and we’ll make the first waystation by dusk tomorrow. Agreed?” And four voices said agreed, and the cat in the sun stretched one paw and pulled it back and kept sleeping, and outside the window a cart rattled past on the river road, and inside the Copper Kettle the fire popped one last time, and I got up to clear the bowls, because clearing bowls is a grandfather’s privilege, and nobody argued, because they already knew not to.
Here is the thing I did not say out loud, though, friend, and I will say it to you because you and I are alone in this telling. I said I had measured them. I said I had taken the weight of each. What I did not say, because a grandfather does not say it, is that they had also measured me, and I had felt it happen, each of the four of them in their own way putting their scale under me and seeing what I weighed. Aldric had measured me as a potential source, in the scholar’s way. Ysolde had measured me as a potential companion, in the open-hearted way. Balthazar had measured me as a potential liability, in the suspicious sailor’s way. And Seraphine — Seraphine had measured me the most carefully of all, with that jeweler’s look, and I had felt her decide, somewhere between the first sip of wine and the last mouthful of stew, that I was the one to watch.
She was right to watch me. I am worth watching. I am older than I look, and I am older than I say, and I have been on Saṃsāra longer than any four Guild clerks put together, and I have seen two Vales in my life already, not just this Forsaken one, and I have performed a binding before, a long long time ago, in another country, under another name, and I remember what a binding costs, and I remember what it costs when the binding is done by people who have not been told what they are binding.
I did not say any of that to them. I will not say it for a while yet. A grandfather does not unpack his whole cupboard on the first night. A grandfather opens one jar at a time, and he opens the jar the younger ones need, and he leaves the rest sealed.
But I set it down in my mind that night, along with the measurements, like coins into a pouch: that when the moment came, in the ritual chamber, at the Circle’s edge, I would have to be the one to say the thing nobody else knew how to say. And that was why Gaialilith, in whatever slow patient amused wisdom she reserves for old men with kettles, had put me in this party. Not for the stew. Though the stew had been, I will admit, quite good.
I banked the fire. I thanked Brigid. I took my bowl and my spoon and I sat down by the hearth and I ate what was left in the pot, because a cook eats last, that is the rule, and I watched the four of them settle into the benches along the wall with the slow tired settling of people who have had a very long morning and a very long afternoon and who have agreed, without yet knowing quite how, to spend the next month of their lives walking toward something terrible together. And my old heart, which is not as old as I let on but is not as young as I wish, did the small warm clench it does when a thing has begun that cannot be unbegun, and I said, under my breath, the small blessing my own grandmother had taught me when I was a boy and had forgotten once and remembered again, and I blessed the four of them, one at a time, by the names they had not yet told me to call them by, and then I blessed myself, because that is also the rule, and then I finished my stew.
The kettle was still warm on the hearth. Outside, the evening was coming on, slow and blue. Inside, four strangers were becoming a party, and one old fool was trying not to love them yet, and failing, the way he always failed, because that is the one measurement he has never learned how to take.
Segment 3: A Ledger of Provisions and Lies
Call me Balthazar. Call me that, and call me nothing else, for the longer name that was given me at my first drowning I do not give to shopkeepers, and the longer name that was given me at my second drowning I do not give to anyone at all. Balthazar will do. Balthazar has always done. Balthazar will continue to do, long after the rest of me has been chewed to pieces by whatever patient mouth is waiting at the bottom of whichever sea I am permitted to fall into a third time.
It was the morning after the Copper Kettle, and the five of us had agreed, in that soft and foolish way that people agree to things when they are full of stew and warm by a fire, that we would ride at first light, and that we would stop at the market-square of the town of Haverfold on our way, because Haverfold is the last town of any commercial consequence between the city and the Forsaken Vale, and whatever we did not buy there we would not have a chance to buy at all. And so, at what the poets are pleased to call first light but what is in fact a gray unfinished hour in which no reasonable creature is awake and no honest shadow has yet been cast, we saddled and we rode.
I do not love horses. I wish to register this upon the record. Horses are, to a sailor, an unreliable vessel with four rudders and a mind of its own, none of which is in conversation with any of the others. A ship, for all its moods, knows itself to be a ship. A horse believes itself to be many things in succession — hungry, startled, affronted, in love with a distant fencepost, suddenly afraid of a rock that has not moved in a thousand years — and all of these beliefs happen at a speed faster than the rider can prepare for. The horse I had been given was a placid brown animal named, so Ysolde informed me, Bramble, and Bramble and I had reached, over the course of the previous day’s ride, the kind of wary detente that exists between two parties who have agreed, for the duration of a shared ordeal, not to kill each other. I did not trust Bramble. Bramble did not trust me. We understood one another.
Ysolde rode ahead, as she always did, and as I now suspected she always would, because Ysolde is the sort of creature who experiences the open road the way I experience a following wind at sea, which is to say as a personal affirmation from whatever god she believes in. Brother Aldric rode in the middle, slightly hunched, his cowl up, muttering to himself, composing, I am nearly certain, the next stanza of whatever chronicle he intends one day to leave behind him as his ransom against oblivion. Seraphine rode at the back. She had chosen the back. She had made the choice look accidental. It was not accidental. Anyone who has ever seen a port-watch placed at the rear of a convoy will know what she was doing. And Tobin — dear Tobin, already, I am sorry to say, already dear Tobin in my private accounting, despite every effort to keep him at the distance I keep most warm things — Tobin ambled somewhere in the middle-rear, humming, with his kettle knocking gently against his back in time with his horse’s gait, a sound that should have been ridiculous and was not.
The road to Haverfold is eleven miles of good stone laid down in the last administration and maintained badly in this one, and we covered it in something under two hours, and we came into the market-square of Haverfold just as the stalls were opening and the smell of fresh bread was fighting its daily losing war against the smell of fresh fish. Haverfold is not a large town. Haverfold is not an important town. Haverfold sits at the crossing of two roads and has contrived, by sheer repetition, to convince itself that it is a place of consequence. This is the entire history of most towns. I am not cruel about Haverfold. I am simply accurate about Haverfold. Haverfold would not have been hurt by the accuracy, had Haverfold been listening, which it was not, because Haverfold was busy selling things.
Now, let me put before you the central principle by which I conduct my life, and by which I intended to conduct the purchasing of our provisions that morning, so that you may understand the grumblings that follow. The principle is this: every seller is lying. This is not cynicism. This is not misanthropy. This is cartography. A seller is a man or woman or gestalt or other who has arranged their life in such a manner that the disposition of goods from their hand to yours is the means by which they feed their children, and this is a noble and necessary arrangement, and I have nothing against it, but within the arrangement itself is coiled a small and unavoidable necessity to lie, because the buyer and the seller have opposed interests regarding the price, and the price is negotiated by means of statements, and some of those statements will be false, and the question is not whether they will be false but which ones. This is true of every seller everywhere, and it is true on the deep ocean and it is true in the market-squares of Haverfold, and it is true in the palaces of the great, and it is true in the cribs of infants who have learned to cry in order to be picked up. We are all, in our commercial moments, liars. The honest buyer understands this. The honest buyer prices the lie into the transaction. The honest buyer does not take it personally.
I take it personally.
I take it personally because I am a fool, and I know I am a fool, and I have known I was a fool for forty-odd years, and I have not been able to cure myself of it. I look at a seller, and I see the lie moving beneath their smile like an eel moving beneath brown water, and my blood rises, and I cannot help it. It is my particular grief, my Balthazar-grief, that I cannot walk past a market stall without feeling, in some chamber of the heart that no amount of salt has pickled into insensibility, that I am being personally slandered by the asking price of a bushel of apples. This is absurd. I know it is absurd. The seller of the apples does not know me, does not care about me, has no opinion of me, has priced the apples according to his own best estimate of what the market will bear and has no more considered my specific soul in setting the price than the tide has considered my specific soul in its rising and falling twice a day. And yet, when I look at the apples, I feel defamed. This is a defect. I acknowledge it as a defect. It has never once stopped operating.
We divided the list. This was Tobin’s suggestion, and it was the right one, because a party of five that shops as a unit will be milked like a cow at a county fair, whereas a party of five that disperses into the market and regathers at the appointed hour with its individual cargoes will be milked less, though milked still. Ysolde took the list of perishables — bread, cheese, hard sausage, dried fruit, a wheel of something yellow that might have been cheese and might have been soap, and she would tell soap from cheese in a single sniff, which I cannot. Tobin took the list of cook-stores and spices, because no one would have dared sell Tobin bad salt, the merchants having a sixth sense for which old men cannot be cheated on condiments. Aldric took the list of paper, ink, and minor supplies of scholarly use, because he would know whether the ink was properly iron-gall and whether the paper had been pressed with decent sizing, and the rest of us would not. Seraphine took the list of fine goods — she had proposed it herself, with that slight lift of the eyebrow which with Seraphine substitutes for a whole speech, and the proposal was instantly accepted, because the rest of us understood, without having to be told, that Seraphine’s presence at a stall selling fine goods would reduce the asking price by approximately one quarter without a single word being haggled. This is a kind of magic. I have seen it before in courtiers of certain ports. It is not my magic, and I cannot do it, and I do not want it, but I respect it.
I took the hardware. I took the hardware because the hardware was where the most lying would occur, and I could not in good conscience let any of the others face it alone. Waterskins. Cooking kit. Oilcloth. Rope. Lamp oil. Spare flints. Tarred canvas. A small hand-axe. Pitons and a coil of hempen line for descending into whatever fool thing we would need to descend into. A set of needles and waxed thread for the inevitable mending. Two decent pairs of gloves, one for grip and one for warmth. A mallet. A small anvil for hoof-work, because Ysolde had insisted on it and I had not argued, Ysolde being correct about such matters. And a second small hand-axe, because one hand-axe is an accident waiting to happen and two hand-axes is a plan.
I began with the rope.
The rope-seller was a man named — I did not ask him his name, I never ask them their names, their names are the first of their lies — let us call him the rope-seller. He was a short man, broader than he was tall, with hands like two small hams and a face that had been weathered into a permanent expression of mild grievance. He had, in his stall, three grades of rope: hempen of ordinary weave, hempen of fine weave, and a silk-hemp blend that shimmered faintly in the gray morning light and was, the rope-seller assured me, “the finest line in the province, laid by the widow Marsh herself, who has been laying line for thirty-seven years, and whose rope is used by the Royal Mountain Rescue of three separate island nations.” He told me this in the manner of a man reciting a prayer. He had recited it many times. He expected me to be moved.
I was not moved.
I picked up the ordinary hempen, because ordinary hempen is what you use when you are going to pull things, and I pulled a length of it through my hands, and I felt the twist, and I felt the tightness of the lay, and I smelled it, because rope that has been stored wrong smells, and this rope did not smell. That was one point in the rope-seller’s favor, though not yet a decisive one. I asked the price. He named the price. The price was high. I told him the price was high. He told me the price reflected the widow Marsh’s thirty-seven years. I told him the widow Marsh had not, to my certain knowledge, laid this particular rope, because the twist on it was a half-turn looser than her usual and the hemp was from the spring harvest and she preferred the autumn. He looked at me. I looked at him. He lowered the price by ten percent. I picked up the fine-weave and pretended to consider it. He lowered the price of the ordinary hempen by another ten percent. I put the fine-weave down. He said that was his final offer. I said it was not his final offer, and offered a price that was fifteen percent below his second offer. He told me I would ruin him. I told him he would not be ruined. He told me his wife would weep. I told him his wife had wept many times and had always recovered. He laughed, for the first time, a small honest bark of a laugh, and he accepted my price, and I accepted his rope, and we parted, I will not say as friends, but as two professionals who had done an honest hour’s work together in under four minutes.
I walked away with one hundred feet of good hemp line, and I will now confess to you a thing that I will not confess to the party until and unless it becomes necessary. I enjoyed that transaction. I enjoyed it with a specific and unbecoming relish. It is one of the perversions of my character that the very thing I profess to hate — the lying, the bargaining, the small theater of the market — is also the thing that makes me feel, for the brief minutes of its duration, most alive. I was born for the deck of a ship and the salt wind and the honest danger of the long swell, and I tell myself this, and I believe it, and yet I will tell you, reader, that the moment in which a rope-seller and I arrived at a price neither of us was wholly satisfied with was as close to ecstasy as I have come in this decade. What does it mean that I am a man who has drowned twice, and the sensation most nearly resembling salvation is the completion of a mid-grade rope purchase in a provincial market-square at half past the morning bell? What kind of soul is this, that the gods have assigned to this salt-cured body? I do not know. I think about it often. I think about it too often. I am thinking about it now.
The waterskins were next, and here is where I must pause the narrative and say a true thing about waterskins, because the waterskin is a vessel and I, as a sailor, know a thing or two about vessels, and the waterskin is also, I have come to believe, a metaphor, and I, as a man who has drowned twice, have perhaps earned the right to pursue a metaphor for a paragraph or two without apology.
A waterskin is a sewn bag of cured hide, and everything about it depends on the seam. The hide can be of the finest quality, taken from the youngest goat, cured in the most patient hands, oiled with the richest oil, and none of this will matter if the seam is bad. The seam is where the skin is joined to itself, where the two halves of the vessel are sewn into one vessel, where the waterskin becomes a waterskin and ceases to be two flat pieces of leather. The seam is the whole argument of the waterskin. A waterskin without a seam is a puddle. A waterskin with a bad seam is a puddle waiting to happen. A waterskin with a good seam is a small miracle of human ingenuity, a promise made by the tanner to the shepherd and by the shepherd to the stitcher and by the stitcher to the buyer and by the buyer to themselves, a promise that water will stay where water is put, at least for the duration of a journey, and this promise is kept or broken at the seam and nowhere else.
I picked up the first waterskin on the stall and I turned it inside out, and I held the seam up to what little light the market was willing to give me, and I ran my thumb along the stitching, and I found, at the fourth inch of the main seam, a place where the stitcher had skipped a loop. One loop. One half of one moment of attention, lost while she was thinking about her sister’s baby or the rent that was due or the man who had spoken to her yesterday in the lane. One loop, and this waterskin would fail on the fourth day of any serious journey, in the heat of an afternoon, when it was full and slung from a saddle and jostled by a horse’s gait, and the loop would unpick itself, and the seam would open by a thumb’s width, and a quarter of a day’s drinking-water would pour out into the dust, and the rider would not notice until they reached for the skin an hour later and found it flat, and they would curse, and they would go thirsty, and they would, if they were lucky, reach the next stream before the sun went down.
I put that waterskin back. I said nothing to the vendor. I picked up the second waterskin. The seam was better. I picked up the third. The seam was better still. I picked up the fourth. The seam was the work of a master. I asked the vendor the price of the fourth. The vendor quoted me the price of the fourth. I put the fourth down and picked up the second, which was the next-best, and asked the price. The vendor quoted me a price four coppers below the fourth, which was an honest price, considering the honest difference in seamcraft. I bought four of the second and left the fourth where it was, because the fourth was a master’s work and should go to someone who would appreciate it, and I am a sailor, and a sailor does not appreciate masterwork, a sailor appreciates reliability. The vendor understood this, I think. The vendor gave me a small nod. We did not speak further. The transaction concluded.
And as I walked away with my four waterskins slung over my shoulder, I felt the cosmic unease of which I now must speak, because the moment had overtaken me and I cannot describe this market honestly without describing it.
A waterskin is a vessel. A ship is a vessel. A body is a vessel. A soul is a vessel. This I know. This is the oldest knowledge in any sailing town, and it is known by mothers and known by priests and known by drunks in dockside taverns, and it is the kind of knowledge that in ordinary times one does not think about, because thinking about it is what the old women in the harbor used to call “getting your foot on the deep plank,” meaning you were about to think yourself into a spot from which it was hard to come back. But I was getting my foot on the deep plank, reader, there in the market-square of Haverfold, with four new waterskins over my shoulder and the cool provincial morning still unwarmed around me, and I was thinking: each of these waterskins is a small soul. Each of these waterskins will be entrusted with something precious. Each of these waterskins will carry what it carries between the place where it is filled and the place where it is emptied, and the whole journey of the water, from source to mouth, depends on whether the seam holds. And I, Balthazar, am also a waterskin. I have been filled, twice, with the whole sea, and both times I was found wanting. Both times the water went out of me, and both times I was emptied and returned to the shore, and both times I was sewn up again by something I did not understand, and I am now walking around in the third iteration of my own skin, with seams I did not make, and I do not know where the skipped loops are, and neither do you, and neither does anyone, and the question of whether my seams will hold is the question underneath every other question of my life, and it is the question underneath every quest, and it is the question underneath this quest in particular, because this quest is a binding, and a binding is a seam, and I do not yet know whether the Guild’s seams are good seams or whether there is a skipped loop at the fourth inch that will let out the water of whatever ancient thing they have decided to sew shut.
This is the line of thought I had. I had it in under a minute. It was walking beside me the entire rest of the morning. I could not shake it. I did not try.
The waterskin-seller, to his credit, had said very little. He had not lied to me. He had told me the prices, and the prices had been honest, and I had bought four skins at an honest price, and I had left. Not every seller lies. I told you at the start that every seller lies. I will now amend the statement. Most sellers lie. A few do not. The few who do not are worth remembering, because when you come back through the market in a year or in ten years, those are the stalls you walk to first, and you buy from them without haggling, and you do not begrudge them their price, because an honest seam is worth the coin.
I crossed to the oilcloth merchant. The oilcloth merchant was a woman of about my own age, thin and brown and sharp-eyed, and she saw me coming, and she pulled out her second-grade bolts before I had even asked, because she had taken my measure at a glance and decided, correctly, that I was not going to be sold first-grade oilcloth at first-grade prices. I respected this. We did business quickly. I bought enough to line the insides of our packs, because we would be going into ruins that had been flooded, according to the maps, and into chambers that might be damp, and wet gear is dead gear. She sold me what I asked for at a price ten percent under what she had offered, and she threw in a quarter-bolt extra because I had not argued her about the first offering, and we parted with the barest nod, which is the highest form of market courtesy.
The lamp oil was contaminated. I will not tell you how I knew it was contaminated. I knew it was contaminated the way you know a rotten egg is rotten before you have cracked it: by a faint wrongness in the vessel itself, in this case a slight oiliness on the outside of the jar that should not have been there if the oil inside had been pure. I asked to smell the oil. The seller hesitated. That was enough. I told the seller I would not be buying oil from him. The seller protested. I walked to the next oil stall and bought there, and I paid a higher price, and I was content to pay it, because an extra two coppers on a jar of lamp oil is a small tithe against the possibility of a lamp that flares and sets your camp on fire in the middle of the night in the middle of a forest that is already slightly enchanted against you. I tell you this not to boast. I tell you this because a man who does not check his lamp oil will deserve his fire, and I have no interest in deserving a fire, having already been punished by water twice.
The pitons and the hempen line for descending we bought from a specialist — there was exactly one stall in Haverfold that sold serious climbing gear, and the proprietor was a weathered woman with a nose that had been broken twice and reset once, which was in its own way the best recommendation her stall could have carried. I did not haggle her. I looked at her pitons, and I looked at her lines, and I looked at her harness-rig, and I named what I wanted, and I paid what she asked, and she saw that I had not haggled, and she lowered the price by five percent on her own initiative, because the market has its own gods and one of them rewards the seller who meets a serious buyer seriously. I thanked her. I did not thank the rope-seller. I did not thank the waterskin-seller, though he had earned it. I thanked her because she had met me as a fellow professional, and fellow professionals thank one another, and that is the one form of warmth I permit myself in commercial contexts.
The hand-axes I bought from an apprentice, because the master smith was sleeping off the previous night, and the apprentice, who was young and anxious and too eager to please, charged me less than the master would have, and I felt, I will admit, a small prick of guilt about this, and I added a copper to the price of my own accord, and the apprentice was confused, and I told him, gruffly, that I had miscounted, and I walked away before he could work it out. I have my weaknesses. This is one. Do not tell anyone. The party does not know this about me and I would prefer to keep it that way.
The needles and waxed thread I bought from an old woman who reminded me distressingly of my own mother, whom I had not seen in forty years, and who was probably dead, and whom I had not gone home to when I had had the chance. I bought more needles than we needed. I paid the old woman her asking price. I did not haggle her. I did not want to haggle her. Some days, you do not haggle. Some days, you let the seam hold. I walked away from her stall and I did not look back, and I do not wish to discuss it further.
The gloves I bought last, because I knew the glove-stall, I had bought gloves in Haverfold before, on an earlier voyage inland, and the glove-man of Haverfold is an honest man who lost his eldest son to a logging accident a year ago and who has not been the same since, and I bought two pairs from him, and I paid him full price, and I asked him how his wife was, and he told me she was well, and we both knew she was not well, and we both respected the small social fiction that she was well, and I walked away, and I did not look back at him either, because when you have been through a certain kind of loss, the last thing you want is to be looked at afterward by a man who has been through something similar. You want to be let alone. You want to be let to carry it. I let him carry it. He let me carry mine. We had done commerce. We had done honesty. We had done, between us, in the space of four minutes, more spiritual work than most friars manage in a year, and neither of us spoke of it, and neither of us will, and that is the other form of warmth I permit myself in commercial contexts, and I hope you will not think less of me for it.
I met the others at the appointed hour at the fountain in the center of the market-square. They had all come in under the bell. Ysolde had her arms full of wrapped parcels and a small cloth-bag of apples she had clearly bought for herself and was eating as she walked. Aldric had a paper parcel of ink and quill-nibs and a small bundle of cut vellum, neatly tied, which he carried with the delicate reverence of a man carrying a sleeping infant. Tobin had a yoke across his shoulders with two baskets of spices and dry goods and a string of garlic and a paper packet of something that smelled, faintly, of home. And Seraphine — Seraphine had one small parcel, tied with a black silk ribbon, and she was not carrying it, she was walking, and behind her a boy of about twelve was carrying the parcel, and I did not ask, and I did not need to ask, because Seraphine had in four minutes’ work conjured a porter out of the Haverfold market-square by what I can only assume was either a coin or a look, and the boy seemed content with the arrangement, and who was I to inquire.
We compared our purchases. Tobin blessed the waterskins. Ysolde inspected the rope and declared it sound. Aldric took one of the hand-axes and turned it over in his hand and said, softly, “A good tool, well-made,” and I felt, I am sorry to say, a small warmth at the compliment, though Aldric had not meant it as a compliment to me, and I had not chosen the hand-axe with any special care beyond my usual care, and there was nothing especially praiseworthy about the axe. But Aldric’s voice has a quality, when he speaks well of a thing, that makes the thing feel spoken for, and I felt myself stand a little straighter under the spoken-for-ness of my axe. This, too, is a defect of character. I will not dwell on it.
Seraphine examined every parcel the others had brought, and she made no comment, but I saw her eyes narrow once, very slightly, at Ysolde’s wheel of yellow cheese, and she said, in her low continental murmur, “The vendor of this cheese has been short-weighting you. Not by a great deal. By perhaps an ounce.” Ysolde looked at her wheel, and then at Seraphine, and then, bless her, she laughed — too loud, as is her way — and she said, “Oh, I know. She’s been doing it for years. She’s got three small children and her husband drinks. I pay her full and let her keep the ounce.” And Seraphine looked at Ysolde for a long moment, and I watched Seraphine’s face do something I had not seen it do before, which was to soften without any of the muscles actually moving, and she said, “I see,” in a tone of voice that contained more genuine approval than I had ever heard from her, and she said nothing further, and we all pretended the exchange had not happened, and we moved on.
And this, reader, was the moment in the market-square of Haverfold at which I understood, for the first time, what the shape of our party was going to be. Because I had spent the whole morning haggling and smelling oil and inspecting seams and muttering at sellers and counting coppers and adding a copper back when I had underpaid, and I had thought, the entire time, that I was the one of us whose job it was to see clearly, to weigh truly, to insist upon honest commerce and honest goods. And here was Ysolde, the laughing horse-woman, knowingly accepting a short weight from a vendor who needed the ounce more than she did, and doing it with open eyes and open heart, and calling it by its true name when Seraphine pointed it out. And I understood, standing there by the fountain with four waterskins over my shoulder and my hand-axes on my hip, that my kind of seeing was the narrow kind, the useful kind, the get-the-party-fed-and-clothed kind, but Ysolde’s kind of seeing was the wider kind, the dangerous kind, the kind that sees the vendor’s three children and the drunken husband and prices them into the transaction the way I price the lie. And I thought: this woman is going to ruin me. This woman is going to make a better man of me by walking beside me and doing nothing in particular. And I resented her, for a moment, a hot small resentment that is the specific property of men who have known for a long time that they are less kind than they could be, and have decided to live with it, and have then been forced to meet someone who will not let them live with it any longer.
I did not tell her any of this. I will not tell her. I grunted at her purchases and she grinned at mine and we packed the saddlebags and we watered the horses at the fountain and we paid the small toll to leave the town at the western gate and we rode on.
The road west of Haverfold climbs for the first two miles and then levels into a long traveling country of low rolling pasture, dotted with stone walls and grazing sheep and the occasional crofter’s cottage, and the enchanted forest lies beyond it, three days’ ride further on. We rode in our earlier formation — Ysolde ahead, Aldric in the middle, Tobin middle-rear, Seraphine at the rear, and me in whatever position shifted to accommodate the others’ comfort, because I had concluded, over the previous day, that my most useful position in this party was in motion between its members, checking them the way a boatswain checks the rigging, except that checking people is less welcome than checking rope and must be done sidelong.
And as we rode, I turned over in my mind, again and again, the strange inventory of what I had bought and what I had not bought, and what each purchase had cost me not in coppers but in the small private currency of my soul. I had bought rope, and paid for it with a stab of ecstasy I would not admit to. I had bought waterskins, and paid for them with a meditation on seams that I would be carrying like a second pack for the rest of the journey. I had bought oil honestly, after refusing oil dishonestly, and paid for that refusal with the private satisfaction of the man who has not been cheated, which is a satisfaction I have come to prize above most pleasures. I had bought hand-axes from an anxious apprentice and paid an extra copper out of guilt, which had cost me more than the copper. I had bought needles from a woman who looked like my mother, and paid her full price, and the price had cost me something I will not name. I had bought gloves from a man carrying an unhealed grief, and we had spoken of his wife who was not well, and neither of us had broken, and that not-breaking had been a purchase of its own, paid in currency I do not have a name for.
And above all of this, threading through all of it, was the cosmic unease.
Because here is the deeper ledger, reader, the ledger I was keeping beneath the visible ledger of coppers and silvers. Every purchase I had made was a small contract, a small promise that the thing I had bought would do the thing it was sold to do. The rope would hold weight. The waterskin would hold water. The oil would burn clean. The axe would cut. The needle would sew. The glove would warm. Each of these was a small and ordinary promise, made in the small and ordinary context of a market-square on a gray provincial morning, and each of them could be broken. And when I strung all of them together into the single larger promise of our provisioning — the promise that the five of us would be equipped to survive two weeks on the road and further days in a ruin — I understood that I was placing an enormous, an almost blasphemous, amount of trust in a long sequence of strangers I had met for less than four minutes apiece. A rope-seller I had haggled. A waterskin-seller I had not. An oil-seller I had refused. A climbing-woman I had respected. An apprentice I had overpaid. An old woman I had not haggled. A glove-man I had loved, briefly and distantly, in the way one man in grief loves another.
And beyond them, a Guild.
This was the plank upon which my foot now stood. The Guild. Because if my reasoning had any force at all, then the Guild, too, was a seller. The Guild was selling us a quest. The Guild had priced the quest. The Guild had described the quest. The Guild had told us what the quest would contain and what the quest would deliver. And the Clerk — poor frightened Emeric Fayre, whom I could still see in my mind’s eye with his tremble and his guilty tapered candle — the Clerk had told us, in effect, that the Guild’s seam was not a good seam. That there was a skipped loop somewhere. That when we reached the fourth inch of this purchase, the water would run out, and it would not be the water we had been told we were carrying.
I turned Bramble’s head slightly to the left to take us around a pothole in the road, and Bramble did not argue, and we went on.
What was I, then? I was a man who had just spent an entire morning inspecting the seams of small vessels, and who was now riding westward, slowly, toward a contract whose seams he had not been permitted to inspect. I had bought four waterskins after examining twelve. The Guild had handed me one waterskin, sight unseen, and told me it was full of what they said it was full of, and I was carrying it on my back, and I was not permitted to turn it inside out. This is the position of every adventurer who has ever taken a Guild writ. This is the position of every sailor who has ever signed a captain’s articles. This is the position, I began to suspect, of every soul who has ever been summoned to Saṃsāra, handed an avatar, and told to make a life in it. We are all, all of us, carrying vessels we have not been permitted to inspect, and the question of whether the seams will hold is the question we only find out the answer to when the seams have failed, and by then it is too late to haggle.
I was not comforted by this line of thought. But I was made companionable by it, in my way. I am a man who takes comfort in being unconsoled. Give me a truly hopeless vista, and I will pitch my small fire in front of it and eat my small supper with a straight spine. Give me a genuinely cheerful vista, and I will find the rot in the corner and sit staring at the rot all evening. This is how I was made. I was not made this way by choice. I was made this way by two drownings, and the drownings did not ask me whether I preferred to be remade in this pattern, and there would be no use in asking now whether I prefer to be remade again, because the remakings do not consult the remade. So I rode on, beside my reluctantly agreed-upon party of four other strangers, with four waterskins over my shoulder and a length of hemp at my saddle and two hand-axes at my belt and a cosmic unease folded neatly between my ribs, and I muttered, under my breath, the old Balthazar muttering, the one I have been keeping up for years:
Balthazar bought the rope. Balthazar checked the seams. Balthazar paid for the oil that was not rancid. Balthazar did the work. If the work is undone, it will not be undone by Balthazar. Remember this, when the reckoning comes. Balthazar did his part.
And Bramble, my placid brown mare, whom I did not trust and who did not trust me, flicked an ear at my muttering, as though she had heard it before, as though she had heard this exact muttering in a thousand different provincial roads on a thousand different gray mornings from a thousand different men of middle years carrying four waterskins westward toward something that would probably kill them. She was, I think, not much impressed. Horses are not easily impressed by men. I do not blame them for this. We have not, as a species, given them many reasons to be.
We rode on. The sun rose a little. The countryside opened a little. Ysolde began, somewhere up ahead of the rest of us, to sing. It was a folk song I half-remembered, a thing about a fisherman and his lost net, and it was the wrong song for our circumstances and exactly the right song for our spirits, and I found — I who do not sing, I who have not sung since my second drowning, I who consider singing a form of surrender to the unseriousness of the world — I found that I was humming along with her, not aloud, but deep in the chest where nobody could hear me. And I was not embarrassed by it. I was not pleased with it. I simply noted it, as a seam I had not known was there, and I let it be, and we rode on westward, into the day, with our provisions and our purchased lies and our un-inspected contract and our four small skins of held water, carrying the sum of the morning’s transactions with us as if the transactions had been a small brittle armor against what was coming, which of course they were not, but which of course, in another sense, they were.
Balthazar bought the rope. Balthazar checked the seams. Balthazar saw the skipped loop before anyone else did. Let that be entered into the ledger. Let that be part of the record. When the time comes, and the great seam splits, and the water of whatever ancient binding pours out into the dust of the Vale — and I now believed, riding that morning, that it would split, and soon — let it be known that one of us was watching for the skipped loop, and watching for it not out of love, for Balthazar does not love, but out of the long stubborn habit of a man who has been emptied twice and does not intend to be emptied a third time without at least filing a complaint first.
The road went on. The sheep went on. The small wind went on. The song went on ahead of me in Ysolde’s good voice, and my own silent humming went on in my chest, and somewhere behind me I could feel Seraphine’s attention sweeping the road the way a lighthouse sweeps the sea, and somewhere in the middle I could feel Aldric composing, and somewhere near him I could feel Tobin humming his own tune under his own kettle, and somewhere on my own back I could feel my four waterskins swaying in time with Bramble’s gait, and I thought: we are a vessel, the five of us, riding west. We are a vessel made of five smaller vessels, and the seams between us have not yet been sewn, and they will be sewn in the days ahead, by whatever patient stitcher is keeping the ledger of parties on this world, and whether our seams will hold when we reach the fourth inch of the Vale, I do not know. I do not know. I do not know. And the not-knowing is the whole of the journey, and I, Balthazar, who have been emptied twice, who have been stitched twice, who have been set sailing again twice, I, Balthazar, am going to ride on west anyway, with my four waterskins and my bought lies and my muttered ledger, because what else, reader, what else is there for a twice-drowned man to do but ride on, and hum along with the horse-woman’s song, and keep an eye on the seams, and trust, for once, against his own better judgment, that some of the seams in this party were laid by a master?
There. I have said it. I did not mean to say it. Strike it from the record, if you can. If you cannot, let it stand, and let Balthazar be mocked for it in whatever afterlife this chronicle finds me in. But strike it if you can. Balthazar does not say such things. Balthazar will deny having said it. Balthazar will, if pressed, produce the receipt for the four waterskins and say that was all he meant, the seams of the skins, and no seams of any other kind, and he will look you in the eye when he says it, and you will know he is lying, and he will know you know, and neither of you will speak of it further, because that is how Balthazar does his commerce, and that is how Balthazar does his loving, which is the same thing in the end, only priced differently.
We rode on.
Segment 4: The First Road and the Green Morning
Och, but there’s a mornin’ that comes to a body once in a lang while, and it comes wi’ sic a particular sweetness that ye ken, even before ye’ve rightly opened your eyes, that ye’ll be carryin’ it in your heart the rest of your natural days, whether the days after it turn fair or turn foul. This was such a mornin’. I’ll tell ye true, lad, lass, whoever ye are that listens, I’ll tell ye true: I’ve had bonnier mornin’s in point of weather, and I’ve had mornin’s of greater moment in point of consequence, but I havena had, in thirty-odd years of risin’ afore the sun, a mornin’ with quite this particular cast of green upon it, this particular slant of light across the dewy fields, this particular hush before the birdsang began, when I sat my dun mare Muirne at the head of four other souls I had known for less than two full days and felt, with the whole of my foolish open heart, that we were set out upon somethin’ that mattered.
We were two miles west of Haverfold, and the stone road had given way to a softer way of packed earth and rutted cart-track, and the country had opened itself up the way a flower opens when ye dinna press it. The hedgerows on either side were in their high summer fullness, hawthorn and blackthorn woven thick with bramble and eglantine, and the morning dew hung on every leaf like a wee glass lantern, and every leaf was holdin’ its wee lantern up as if to say, here, see, we are here, ye are passin’ through, we bid ye well. I rode ahead. I always ride ahead. Tobin had said, back at the Copper Kettle, that a party ought to have a scout, and then he had looked at me in that gentle sidelong way he has of lookin’ at folk when he’s already decided what they are, and he’d said, “Lass, I believe you’ll be our scout,” and I’d said aye wi’out thinkin’, the way ye say aye to a thing ye were goin’ to do anyway, the way ye agree with the wind that ye’ll be walkin’ into it.
Muirne was fresh beneath me. A good horse knows the first mornin’ of a long ride the way a good dog knows the first mornin’ of a hunt, and Muirne had been quiverin’ at the gate of the Copper Kettle’s yard before I’d even put the saddle on her, and when I’d mounted her she’d done that wee shuffle-dance of the forehooves that a hot-blooded mare does when she’s askin’ permission to canter, and I’d told her, “Soft, lass, soft, we’ve a lang road yet,” and she’d settled, but only the way a banked fire settles, not the way a fire gone out. She wanted to run. I wanted her to want to run. A horse that doesna want to run on the first mornin’ of a lang ride is a horse ye ought to worry about. It tells ye somethin’ about the horse, and sometimes it tells ye somethin’ worse about the day.
The other four were strung out behind me on the road in a loose line, each findin’ their own comfortable pace, and I could hear them wi’out lookin’ back, because I’ve been livin’ in country wi’ horses all my life, and I can tell ye wi’ my eyes closed which horse is behind which, by the particular rhythm of its hoofbeats. Aldric’s grey gelding had a slow and even step, thoughtful as its rider, and it picked its feet up a wee bit higher than it needed to, which meant it was a horse that had learned to be polite to strangers, which is a trait I admire in horses and in people both. Seraphine’s black mare was lighter on the road, a finer-boned creature, and her step had a silken quality that made me think of a cat crossin’ a windowsill. Balthazar’s brown was the easiest to pick out, because Balthazar’s brown made an honest noise, a plain four-beat clomp, and ye could hear the wee hitch in her gait that told ye Balthazar was not an easy rider, that he leaned wrong in his seat by a degree or two, that he was makin’ the mare work harder than she needed to work, and that the mare was forgivin’ him for it the way a patient mare forgives a landsman who has not yet learned the secret of not foughtin’ the animal beneath him. And Tobin’s old roan — ah, Tobin’s old roan, bless the pair of them — Tobin’s old roan trudged along wi’ that particular comfortable clop of a horse who has carried the same man for more years than either of them is willin’ to admit, and she knew his weight, and he knew her pace, and they were a married thing, the two of them, in that way that a horse and a rider get to be married when ye’ve been together lang enough that ye’ve forgot ye were ever two separate souls.
I sang.
I’ll no’ apologize for it, reader. I sang because the mornin’ was green and the dew was on the hedgerows and my mare was fresh beneath me and I had four souls behind me whose names I did not yet rightly ken and whose hearts I wanted to ken by the time we’d reached the enchanted wood, and singin’ is the one sure way I have ever found to hurry a heart’s knowin’ along the road. I started wi’ an old thing, the way ye start wi’ an old thing when ye’ve no’ yet decided what ye mean to sing, a wee air my gran used to hum when she was stirrin’ the butter, a thing wi’out proper words, a thing ye can put any words to that come into your head. And I put words to it as I went, because that is the way of songs on the road, they make themselves up under ye while ye’re ridin’, and ye can either pay attention to the words or ye can let them pass through ye like weather, and either way the song does its work, which is to open the chest a wee bit wider than it was open before.
I sang about the hedgerow. I sang about the mare’s ears, which were flickin’ forward and back, forward and back, listenin’ to my song and listenin’ to the road ahead. I sang about the four souls at my back, one at a time, though I did not name them in the singin’, because ye don’t name folk in a song that other folk might be hearin’, that’s a way of sayin’ too much too soon and makin’ a body self-conscious. I sang about Brother Aldric wi’out namin’ him, about the man in the grey cowl who writes everythin’ down, and I made him a wee rhyme about a heron that watches the river and forgets to eat its fish, and I smiled to myself when I sang it, because I thought he would like the heron if he ever overheard it, which I did not think he would, because I kept my voice pitched for myself and Muirne and the hedgerow and not for the party at my back. I sang about Balthazar as a grumblin’ wind that has been twice around the world and still hasna found a harbor it approves of. I sang about Seraphine as a black cat in a velvet coat who has decided which mouse to save. I sang about Tobin as an old copper kettle that has been through many kitchens and will outlast them all. And I sang about myself as a daft lass who rides ahead of every party she joins and sings her heart out at the hedgerows, and gets a mouthful of midges for her trouble, and deserves them.
The hedgerows were bonnie. I want to pause on the hedgerows, because a hedgerow tells ye a great deal about a country if ye ken how to read it, and this road’s hedgerows were tellin’ me somethin’ I was takin’ note of wi’out yet understandin’ why. A hedgerow in high summer ought to be wild in its middle and tight on its edges, because that’s what a good farmer wants it to be — wild in the middle to house the hedgehogs and the dunnocks and the wee creatures that eat the pests in the fields, and tight on the edges so the sheep canna push through. A hedgerow that has been well-tended gives ye that double character, ragged at the crown and neat at the hem, and ye can see where the billhook has gone and where it hasn’t, and ye can tell from a mile whether the farmers in the parish have been lazy this season or diligent.
The hedgerows on the first two miles out of Haverfold were diligent. They had been laid and pleached in the proper old way, the way my father used to do it, where ye cut the main stems most of the way through at an angle and bend them over and weave them between the live stakes, and ye leave just enough uncut that the stem keeps livin’ and sends up new growth in the spring, and the hedge grows into itself and becomes a livin’ fence that willna come apart for twenty or thirty years. Ye can tell a pleached hedge by the scars on the old stems, angled and healed, and ye can tell the age of the layin’ by the thickness of the new growth. These hedges had been laid maybe eight or nine years back, and they were just comin’ into their second maturity, and they were beautiful, and they were tended, and the farmers of the first two miles out of Haverfold were diligent men and women, and I made a note to myself to speak well of this parish if ever it came up in conversation.
But then we passed a turn in the road, and the hedgerows changed. I didna notice it all at once. I noticed it by degrees, the way ye notice the wind changin’ direction when ye’re walkin’ in it, by the feel on the back of your neck before ye have a word for it. The hedges grew raggeder. Then they grew gappier. Then they had been let go outright, the blackthorn and the hawthorn shootin’ up into wee spindly trees, and the bramble takin’ over the lower reaches, and whole lengths of the hedge just gone, collapsed into the ditch, wi’ no livestock-proof barrier at all between the road and the fields beyond. And the fields beyond were not bein’ worked. I could see that too, though I had to look twice to be sure. A field that’s been let lie fallow for a year has a particular look, a softness, a risin’ of the weeds in the pattern of whatever was planted there last. A field that’s been let lie fallow for two years has a differenter look, harder, wi’ the first brambles and the first scrub creepin’ in from the edges. And a field that’s been abandoned for three years or more has a look I had not seen in all my years of ridin’, but which I recognized from my father’s descriptions of the bad seasons in his own father’s time, when a parish had been hollowed out by disease or by war or by some other misfortune and there were no hands left to work the land. That was the look of the fields beyond the raggedy hedges on the third mile out of Haverfold. That was the look of a country that had been abandoned by the folk who used to tend it, and recently, within livin’ memory, but not within last season’s memory, and not within last year’s.
My singin’ trailed off. I didna make a show of stoppin’. Ye dinna make a show of stoppin’ a song when ye’re scoutin’, because the song is part of your scout, and stoppin’ it abruptly is a signal to the party at your back that somethin’ has changed, and ye dinna want to signal somethin’ has changed until ye ken what it is that has changed, because otherwise ye’re puttin’ a fear into them that might not be warranted, and puttin’ unwarranted fears into your party is a worse crime, in my accountin’, than missin’ a warranted one, because the unwarranted fears blunt the party’s edge against the warranted one when it comes.
So I let the song fade slow, the way a song fades when a singer has come to the natural end of a stanza and is considerin’ what to sing next, and I rode on, and I kept my face in its usual scoutin’ expression, which is pleasant and alert and tells ye nothin’, and I turned my attention to the hedgerows wi’ a different kind of attention than I had been payin’ them before.
And I saw the track.
It was a deer-track, at first glance. It cut through a gap in the ragged hedge on the north side of the road, and it went down into the ditch and up the far bank and off into the fallow field beyond, and it had the general shape of a deer-track, and a lesser scout would have let the eye pass over it. But I am not a lesser scout. My father taught me to read a deer-track before he taught me to read my letters, and I will tell ye true: this was not a deer-track. A deer puts its weight down in a particular way, and the hoof-mark of a deer has a particular cloven shape, narrow at the front and wider at the back, and a deer steps lightly enough that the track in softer ground is no more than a thumb’s depth. This track was shaped like a deer-track but it was pressed too deep. Whatever had made it was too heavy to be a deer. And when I looked closer — I didna dismount, I didna even slow Muirne much, I just let her walk a shade slower and I let my eyes go where they needed to go — I could see that the track had been made wi’ a curious evenness, as if whatever had made it was steppin’ with a care that no real deer would use. Real deer are hasty creatures. They leave hasty tracks. This track was a track made at leisure, by somethin’ that had time to consider its stride.
I let my eyes slide off the track wi’out lettin’ them linger on it, because I did not want whoever had made that track to see me seein’ it. This, reader, is a thing my gran taught me, and my gran learned it from her gran, and I dinna ken how far back the teachin’ goes but it is older than I am by many generations. Ye dinna look direct at a thing ye want to observe, if there’s a chance the thing is observin’ ye back. Ye let your eye pass over it and away, and ye take a picture of it in your mind, and ye study the picture later, when your face has turned to other things. If ye look direct at it, the thing will ken it has been seen, and if the thing has any wit at all, it will adjust. And I did not want this thing, whatever it was, to adjust.
I rode on. I started a new song, a softer one, an old lullaby my mother used to sing, the one about the selkie’s daughter and the fisherman’s boot. I pitched my voice a wee bit lower, and I let Muirne walk, and I let the party at my back close up a shade. I wanted Tobin nearer. I did not want him so near that he would notice me wantin’ him near. But I wanted him within the range of a low-called word, because Tobin is the one of us I would say a low-called word to first, and not because I mistrust the others, but because Tobin is the one who will hear the low-called word wi’out makin’ a commotion of it. Aldric would write it down. Balthazar would mutter it. Seraphine would act on it, which is sometimes the right answer and sometimes not. Tobin would simply hear it, and nod, and the two of us would go on as before, and whatever needed doin’ would get done in good time.
And now here’s the part I’ll tell ye honest, because I am tellin’ ye this whole mornin’ honest and I will not start bein’ less than honest about the parts that matter most. I felt the watch. I felt it on the back of my neck, and I felt it on the crown of my head, and I felt it behind my left shoulder, and it was not the watch of a deer nor the watch of a fox nor the watch of any creature I have ever known in thirty-odd years of ridin’ through countries that are full of watchin’ creatures. It was the watch of somethin’ that thought. It was the watch of somethin’ that was interested. It was the watch of somethin’ that had a purpose in its watchin’ and had not yet decided whether that purpose was friendly or otherwise, and was takin’ its time to decide, and did not care whether I felt it decidin’.
This was not a feelin’ I liked. But I will tell ye a true thing, and it surprised me too as it rose up in me: I was not afraid. Or rather, I was afraid in the proper clean way a body ought to be afraid when somethin’ is watchin’ it, the prickly way that makes the hair on the neck stand up and the hearin’ sharpen and the smell come in brighter, but I was not afraid in the clenched-up way that makes a body stupid. I had the fear that makes ye smarter. I did not have the fear that makes ye dumber. There is a great difference between the two, and the difference is what separates a scout from a passenger, and I have been a scout since I was nine years old, and I ken the difference the way ye ken the difference between salt and sugar wi’out havin’ to taste them.
So I rode on, and I sang the lullaby, and I watched the hedgerows wi’out appearin’ to watch them, and I let Muirne’s ears do half the watchin’ for me, because Muirne’s ears were doin’ the thing they do when there is somethin’ in the landscape that the mare does not care for. A horse’s ears will tell ye more than a man’s eyes if ye ken how to read them. They were not pinned back, which would have meant the mare was readyin’ to kick or to bite. They were not pricked full forward, which would have meant the mare was readyin’ to bolt. They were in the middle position, flickin’ constant, first one then the other, sweepin’ the landscape the way a lighthouse sweeps the sea, and the rhythm of the flickin’ was faster than it had been an hour earlier. Muirne felt the watch. Muirne did not like the watch. Muirne was a good mare and she was trustin’ me to do somethin’ about it, and I was trustin’ her to keep walkin’ until I had decided what the somethin’ was.
We came to a wee rise in the road, and as we crested it I looked back under the pretense of adjustin’ my saddlebag, and I caught the party at my back in one glance, and I will tell ye who saw what.
Tobin saw me look back. Tobin was always seein’ everythin’, in that ambly unobtrusive way of his. He gave me a wee nod, not an interrogative nod, just an acknowledgin’ nod, the kind of nod that says, I ken ye looked back, and I ken ye had a reason, and I am ready when ye need me. I loved him for it. I had known him for less than two days and I loved him the way ye love an old shepherd ye meet at a crossroads who tells ye which way the storm is comin’. There is a kind of love that forms fast between people who ken the same language wi’out havin’ to speak it, and Tobin and I kenned the same language, whatever the language was called, and we had kenned it since the stew at the Copper Kettle, and the rest of our acquaintance was goin’ to be the slow and pleasant unpackin’ of that first kennin’.
Seraphine was already watchin’ the hedgerows. She had started some minutes before I had, I realized, and she had been watchin’ them wi’ that precise courtier’s quarter-turn of the head that gives ye everythin’ and shows ye nothin’. I had not noticed her noticin’. That was because she did not want me to notice her noticin’, and Seraphine is very good at that, and I made a note in the back of my mind that Seraphine and I were goin’ to have to work out a way of signalin’ to each other, because it is no use havin’ two scouts in a party and lettin’ them scout blind of one another.
Balthazar was mutterin’. Balthazar was always mutterin’. But I caught, as we passed each other on the rise, the particular tone of his mutter, and the tone of his mutter had changed from the mornin’s earlier tone, which had been the general-discontent-wi’-the-universe mutter, to a more particular mutter that I had not heard from him before, and which I took to mean that Balthazar’s sailor’s sense had also picked up somethin’. He gave me a look as I looked back, and the look was brief, and it said, I see ye seein’ it, and I am on watch, and dinna ye worry about the back of the column. That is what the look said. I read it true, I am sure of it.
Aldric was composin’. Aldric was not watchin’ the hedgerows at all. Aldric was lookin’ at the back of his gelding’s neck and composin’ in his head, the way he does, and his lips were movin’ the smallest bit, formin’ words he was not quite sayin’ aloud. And I loved him for it too, though I must confess it was a differenter love than I had for Tobin. I loved Aldric the way ye love a man who is doin’ the thing he was put on this world to do, in the middle of a dangerous road, wi’ his mind full of his own honest work and no attention to spare for the hedgerows. He was not a scout. He would never be a scout. He did not need to be a scout, because the rest of us were scouts, and the shape of the party would accommodate his oblivion to the immediate danger in exchange for his complete attention to the larger one, the larger one being what we should write down about all of this when it was done, and I’ll tell ye true, I would rather ride into a watched hedgerow wi’ Aldric composin’ behind me than wi’ a hundred soldiers who could not tell me afterward what had happened and why.
I turned forward again. I sang the next stanza of the lullaby. I watched Muirne’s ears. I watched the hedges wi’out watchin’ them. And the watch on the back of my neck went on, and on, and on, and it did not approach and it did not recede, which told me that whatever was watchin’ was keepin’ pace wi’ us. It was no’ a single watcher stood still in a field. It was a watcher movin’ as we moved, maintainin’ its distance, learnin’ us.
And here is the part, reader, where I will tell ye the thing I felt next, and I will tell it true even though it will sound strange, because if I do not tell it true now I will have nothin’ honest to set against the stranger things that are comin’. The thing I felt next was not fear, and it was not suspicion, and it was not any of the respectable scout-feelin’s that come when a body is bein’ watched on a strange road. The thing I felt next was a wee prickle of somethin’ that I can only call recognition. As if the watcher, whatever it was, was not a stranger. As if somewhere in the back of my Ysolde-bones there was a bone that kenned this particular quality of watchin’, and kenned it from long ago, from before I was born, from some wee corner of a previous life that had not yet surfaced into my wakin’ mind.
Now, I will tell ye, I dinna believe much in past lives, not in the fancy way the Isekai folk believe, not in the way that lets ye wake up one mornin’ and declare yourself the reincarnation of a queen. I believe in the past life only in the way a farmer’s daughter believes in it, which is to say: I believe that a body remembers what its blood remembers, and the blood remembers many things the body has no proper claim to, and sometimes when ye are on a strange road wi’ a strange watch on your neck ye will feel the blood-memory wake up and tap ye on the shoulder and say, lass, ye ken this. And I felt that tap, on the third mile out of Haverfold, in the ragged hedgerows of the abandoned parish, and the tap said ken this, and I did not ken what it wanted me to ken, and I said back to it, in the silent way ye speak to your own blood, say it plainer, lass, say it plainer, I dinna have time for a riddle, and the blood would not say it plainer. The blood never says it plainer. The blood keeps its counsel, and tells ye only enough to make ye anxious, and leaves the figurin’ out to ye, and that is the nature of blood. I have lived with my blood a lang time, and we have come to an understandin’ of sorts, though I will tell ye honest, there are times I wish I had been born wi’ somebody else’s blood, somebody quieter, somebody who did not tap.
We rode on. The abandoned parish gave way, after another mile or so, to a parish that was inhabited again, and the hedgerows resumed their pleached diligence, and a wee stone cottage appeared on the side of the road wi’ smoke risin’ honest from its chimney, and a red-cheeked woman in a blue apron was beatin’ the dust out of a rug on a clothesline in the dooryard, and she waved at us as we passed, and I waved back, and I sang her a wee snatch of her own parish’s harvest song to show I kenned where we were, and she laughed and called somethin’ I couldna quite hear but which was friendly, and the world was right-side-up again for a hundred yards of road.
And the watch went away.
I will tell ye true, I felt it go. I felt the back of my neck cool, and I felt Muirne’s ears settle into their ordinary forward-pricked scoutin’ position, and I felt the tightness between my shoulder-blades release, and I ken’d, in the same blood-knowin’ way that had given me the feel of the watch in the first place, that whatever had been keepin’ pace wi’ us through the ragged country had ceased to keep pace. It had not followed us into the diligent parish. It had stopped at the border. Which told me somethin’ important. It told me that whatever it was, it was bound to the ragged country. It could watch us there. It could not watch us here. Which meant the ragged country had a character to it that was more than just bein’ abandoned. It was not just empty. It was somebody’s territory. And the abandonment of the human farmin’ was maybe not the cause of the emptiness. It was maybe the consequence.
I took that thought and I folded it up wee and tucked it into the back pocket of my mind, and I resolved to unfold it that evenin’ at whatever camp or inn we made, wi’ Tobin and Seraphine and Aldric and Balthazar all around, and we would look at it together, and Aldric would ken the proper name for the thought and he would write it down, and we would all be better for the sharin’. That is the use of a party, when a party is the right kind of party. Ye dinna have to carry every thought alone. Ye can fold it up and bring it to the evenin’ fire and unfold it among the others, and it becomes their thought as much as yours, and the weight of the thinkin’ gets spread among the five of ye, and no single body has to bear the full weight of the knowin’. I have been in bad parties and I have been in good parties, and the difference is almost entirely in whether ye can unfold your wee thought at the evenin’ fire and be heard.
I started singin’ again in full voice. The lullaby had done its work, and now the mornin’ wanted somethin’ brighter, and I gave it one of the old road-songs, the one about the piper who fell in love wi’ a miller’s daughter and got chased out of seven counties before he won her hand. It’s a cheerful song wi’ a good rhythm for the horse-gait, and I pitched my voice loud enough to carry back to the party, because I wanted them to hear me singin’ and to ken that the scout-end of the column had returned to its ordinary cheerful noise, because the returnin’ of the cheerful noise is itself a kind of scoutin’ signal that says, the watched part is behind us now, ye can ease your shoulders. I hoped they would hear it that way. I hoped Tobin in particular would hear it that way. I hoped Seraphine would hear it and understand it as the technical signal it was.
And I will tell ye, reader, as I sang, and as Muirne settled into her happy walkin’ gait, and as the sun climbed higher and burned off the last of the mornin’ dew, and as the diligent parish unfolded its kind green fields and its wee stone cottages and its goats and its wanderin’ chickens and its red-cheeked wavin’ wives, I felt a thing I had not expected to feel so soon on this journey, and the thing was this: I felt happy. Plain happy. Unshadowed-by-consequence happy, for the length of a ridge of farmland, the length of maybe fifteen minutes of ridin’, and I let myself feel it wi’out tryin’ to make it last lang or to mean anythin’. I was ridin’ a fresh mare on a green mornin’ at the head of a party of four strange souls who I was already startin’ to love in the various ways I love folk, and I was under a blue sky, and I had a song to sing, and I had a road to ride, and I had sausage and cheese in my saddlebags that I had bought wi’ my own money from a vendor I had knowingly let short-weight me, and I had a whole day of ridin’ ahead of me, and the happiness was plain and whole and did not ask to be explained.
That is the gift of a road-mornin’, when ye ken how to take it. Ye take it plain. Ye dinna try to keep it, because it willna be kept. Ye dinna try to justify it, because it doesna need justifyin’. Ye just have it, and when it passes on, ye let it pass, and ye keep the memory of havin’ had it, and the memory becomes a wee coin ye put into the pocket of your heart, and on the bad days later in the journey, ye reach into the pocket and ye find the coin, and ye rub your thumb over it, and ye remember that there was a mornin’ when ye were plain happy on a green road, and ye can go on for another hour because of it. I have a pocket full of such coins. I collect them. I have been collectin’ them since I was nine years old and first rode alone in my father’s back pasture. They are my wealth. They are the wealth that no vendor can short-weight me on, and no tax-collector can reach, and no spectral guardian can steal. They are mine.
But the coin of this mornin’, reader, I will tell ye true, was not a clean coin. It had a wee dark spot on it where the watch had landed. And I put the coin in my pocket anyway, because I have learned over the years that most coins have wee dark spots on them, and if ye wait for a clean coin ye will wait a lang time, and ye may die waitin’. So I pocketed the coin wi’ the dark spot, and I sang my piper-song, and I rode on.
After a wee while, I heard Tobin come up alongside me. He had done it slow, the way Tobin does everythin’ slow, and I had not remarked his approach because I had not wanted to, which is to say, I had been waitin’ for him to come up, and I had been ignorin’ the sound of his approach to give him the courtesy of arrivin’ wi’out havin’ been watched for. We rode side by side for half a mile wi’out speakin’. I finished the piper-song. The silence of the road took over, which is a fuller silence than a silence indoors, because a road-silence has the breathin’ of horses in it and the hum of insects and the small creak of tack and the occasional hoof on a loose stone.
And then Tobin said, quiet as ye please, “Ye felt it.”
And I said, “Aye, Tobin, I felt it.”
And he said, “Ye felt it go, too.”
And I said, “Aye, at the border of the diligent parish. It stopped. It didna cross.”
And he said, “Mm. That’s a wee thing to know.”
And he rode beside me another half-mile wi’out sayin’ more. I loved him the whole of the half-mile. I have told ye already I loved him, and I will tell ye again, because it bears repeatin’. I loved him the way ye love an old apple tree in your own dooryard, the kind that has been there since before ye were born and will be there after ye are gone, the kind whose apples are not the sweetest in the parish but are the ones ye keep goin’ back to because ye ken them. Tobin was my dooryard apple tree. I had not planted him. I had met him two days before. But he was my dooryard apple tree, and I was goin’ to eat his apples all the way to the Vale and back, gods willin’, and I was goin’ to thank the tree for every one of them.
After half a mile, Tobin said, “Did ye tell Balthazar?”
I said, “Balthazar felt it wi’out bein’ told. I saw it in his face.”
Tobin said, “Aye, he would. He’s a seam-watcher. He’ll have noted it.”
I said, “Seraphine was on it before I was.”
Tobin said, “Aye, she would be. That one sees around corners. We’ll be glad of it.”
I said, “Aldric was composin’.”
Tobin said, “Aye, he would be. He’s doin’ his own work. We’ll be glad of that too, in a different way.”
I said, “What do ye make of it, Tobin?”
And he rode another few paces, and he sucked at his teeth, which is what he does when he is givin’ a thing proper thought, and he said, “Well, lass. I make of it this. The guild did not tell us everythin’. The clerk told us somethin’ else, but not everythin’ either. And the thing that was watchin’ us the last three miles, I would wager a week’s stew, is a thing that is part of the everythin’ we havena been told. Whether it is the Vale’s own thing, reachin’ out this far to have a look at us before we arrive, or whether it is somebody else’s thing, reachin’ out to have a look for its own reasons, I dinna yet ken. But somebody or somethin’ knows we are comin’, and that somebody or somethin’ is interested enough to take a look at us three days out from the Vale. That tells me the Vale is not sleepin’. The Vale is wakin’. And we are ridin’ into it when it is wakin’. And that is a thing we should talk about at the evenin’ fire.”
And I said, “Aye, Tobin. That is a thing we should talk about at the evenin’ fire.”
And he said, “Keep singin’, lass. The singin’ is good for the party. It will not stop the watcher, but it will stop the watcher from thinkin’ we are a party that can be easily watched. A party that sings is a party that kens it is being watched and does not care. That is a party that is harder to decide about. I want the watcher to have a harder time decidin’ about us, for as lang as we can make the decidin’ hard.”
And I laughed. I’ll no’ deny it. I laughed the loud laugh, the one that carries, the one the locals at the Copper Kettle had smiled at. I laughed it on purpose, because Tobin was right, and because the laugh was the best answer to his counsel, and because I wanted the watcher, wherever it was, to hear the laugh and add it to whatever ledger it was keepin’ about us. Let the watcher note that the scout of this party laughs loud on a green road. Let the watcher wonder what kind of scout does that. Let the watcher take its time decidin’. The langer it takes decidin’, the more miles of road we put behind us, and the more miles of road we put behind us, the nearer we get to the enchanted wood, where the watcher may no longer have the run of its own pasture and may have to contend with other watchers, older watchers, the watchers of the wood itself, who have their own opinions about interlopers and are not shy about expressin’ them.
I sang another song. I made up the words as I went. I sang about five riders on a green road, and I sang about the hedgerows of the diligent parish, and I sang about the red-cheeked wife beatin’ the dust from her rug, and I sang about an old man wi’ a kettle and a lass on a dun mare, and I sang about a watcher in the ragged country that stopped at the border of the diligent land, and I sang it in a tune that sounded merry on its face but had a wee minor turn at the end of each verse that told the watcher, if the watcher had ears for it, that we kenned it was there. I did not care if the watcher had ears for it. I pitched the song for my own ears, and for Muirne’s, and for Tobin’s, and for the party at my back, and for the bones of the road beneath us, and for the blood in my own wrists that had tapped me on the shoulder an hour before and wouldna tell me why, and I sang it until the sun was straight overhead and Tobin said it was about time for a nuncheon-halt, and I picked a pleasant hedgerow-side wi’ a clear view of the road in both directions, and I reined Muirne in, and the party caught up, and we dismounted, and we ate, and for an hour we were five souls at a hedgerow on a green road in a diligent parish on a summer day, wi’ the watched mile behind us and the long road still ahead, and I put the coin of the mornin’ deeper in my pocket, dark spot and all, and I rubbed my thumb over it, and I thought, I will remember this. Whatever comes, I will remember this. And the coin warmed under my thumb the way a coin warms when a body is payin’ proper attention to it, and the road stretched westward, and the sun was high, and the piper-song was in my mouth still though I was not singin’ it aloud anymore, and Muirne cropped the grass at the verge, and life, for a long sweet breath, was what life was meant to be, which was green, and moving, and watched over by somethin’ we did not yet ken the name of, and open, for one more hour, to every kind of thing that had not yet happened.
Segment 5: A Masquerade at the Crossroads Inn
The inn stood at the meeting of four roads, in the shallow bowl of a valley where the country began to lift itself by degrees toward the dark rim of the enchanted forest some nine leagues westward, and it had the particular architecture of all such establishments — a long low building of soot-stained stone beneath a steep roof of grey slate, a stable-block set at right angles across a broad muddy yard, a pair of wooden upper galleries running the length of the upper storey under eaves from which a succession of lanterns had been hung at uneven intervals, the whole composition so perfectly familiar to her, so perfectly indistinguishable from the hundred such inns she had passed through in her former employments, that she knew, with the first glance she gave it through the thinning drizzle of a late grey afternoon, what the evening would bring her, and what it would demand of her, and how she would answer its demands.
Seraphine did not dismount at once. She let the others go ahead. Ysolde swung down in her usual manner, which was to let herself fall with a half-laugh onto the balls of her feet and then immediately begin attending to Muirne’s bridle; Balthazar dismounted in the sequence of small reluctant movements by which a man who does not trust his horse separates himself from it; Brother Aldric slid down with the exaggerated care of one who believes each dismount may be his last; Tobin simply was on the ground, having, by some grandfatherly sleight, arrived there without any of them having seen him dismount. She remained in the saddle an additional half-minute. The reason was not what any of them supposed, which was probably that she did not wish to put her boots in the mud; the reason was that from the saddle she could see into the common room through the open doorway at an angle the others could not, and in the thirty seconds she permitted herself she counted heads, counted exits, catalogued the distribution of the clientele among the tables, noted the position of the hearth and the set of the bar and the three narrow windows along the eastern wall, and marked — marked as a hunter marks the single tremor in a field of grass — the table in the far corner at which four men sat, affecting to examine a bill of lading, who were no more merchants than she was a dairymaid.
She dismounted. She arranged her gloves. She crossed the yard without haste and passed beneath the inn-sign, which bore, in faded gilt upon chipped blue paint, the legend of the Four Winds, and she allowed the landlord to take her cloak, and she allowed him to show her to a table at the opposite end of the common room from the four men, and she did all of this in the particular manner of a woman who has not glanced at the far corner once, whose eyes have not strayed that way, whose attention is entirely and quite evidently upon the small matters of her own weariness and the condition of her cuffs, and who is, for anyone observing her, so perfectly uninterested in the persons populating the public room that it would never enter the mind of any such person that she had counted them and weighed them and assigned to each of them a probability of hostile intent before she had entered.
The four men at the corner table were very good. This, which in another circumstance would have been a pleasure to her — for it is a pleasure, a real and rare pleasure, to encounter competence in the small professions of espionage and questry — was in this circumstance a source of the particular clear cold exhilaration she felt now beginning to rise in her chest, the exhilaration that came over her whenever she understood that the evening ahead would require her full art. They were very good. They had cultivated the bearing of men who had been on the road for a fortnight with bolts of cloth and barrels of oil, and they had committed themselves to the roles in the thorough manner of professionals — one of them had dirt beneath his fingernails of exactly the quality a man accumulates in the handling of goods rather than the handling of weapons, another had the stoop in his shoulder that one acquires from lifting bales and not the stoop that one acquires from drawing a bow, a third wore a money-belt with the easy looseness of a man accustomed to carrying coin and not with the self-conscious tightness of a man pretending to do so. Each of them had done the homework. It was the fourth man who had given them away, and he had done it by a single thing, which was that when the serving-girl came to their table with the third round of ale he had smiled at her with the automatic practiced charm of a man whose professional life has included flirting with serving-girls as a means of extracting information from them, and the smile had lasted one half-second longer than a merchant’s smile would have lasted, and it had been directed at the serving-girl’s eyes rather than at the serving-girl’s tray, and it had been accompanied by the minute lean-forward of a man positioning himself to hear her better if she should say something he wished to hear. That lean-forward had been the whole of it. That lean-forward had told Seraphine, at a distance of some thirty paces, across a smoky public room, in the fifteen seconds between her sitting down and unfolding her napkin, that these four were not merchants, that at least one of them made his living by the gathering of other people’s speech, and that she would be spending her evening, whether she wished to or not, in their quiet and elaborate company.
She wished to.
She sat with her back to the wall, as always — one did not, after four years at the Valmont-Lissarian court and two further years in employments she did not name even to herself, ever sit with one’s back to the room — and she arranged her cuffs, and she permitted the landlord to bring her the inn’s red wine, which was a young thin wine of no particular province but which was not actively poisoned, and which would do, and she turned her attention, outwardly, to Brother Aldric, who was seated at her right and was composing in his tome, and she said to him, in her low continental murmur, “Brother, forgive my intrusion upon your page, but I find I am curious about the etymology of the word vigil. Have you a moment to instruct me?”
Aldric lifted his head. He looked at her. He was, she had long since determined, not a fool; he was, in the specific manner of scholars, capable of sudden and unexpected shrewdness; and she saw in his eyes, in the fractional pause before he answered, that he had understood the question was not about etymology. He said, after that fractional pause, “The word, madame, comes by the old tongue from vigilare, to watch, and its earliest uses are in the context of the monastic offices of night, during which the faithful maintained their watch in expectation of visions. Were you wishing to know the ecclesiastical sense, or the common?”
“The common, I think, will suffice for this evening,” she said, and she inclined her head just so. “Though I shall call upon the ecclesiastical if the evening becomes so tedious as to require it.”
He understood her. She saw him understand her. He did not turn to look at the corner table; he did not alter his posture; he took up his quill and he resumed his composing, and she saw him, from the corner of her eye, adjust the angle at which he was writing so that the polished back of his small silver inkwell caught the reflection of the corner in which the four men sat. A scholar, she thought with a small private warmth, can learn very quickly when he chooses. She made a note of it.
Ysolde, meanwhile, had gone to the bar to speak to the landlord’s daughter about something — probably the kittens of this particular establishment, for Ysolde collected kitten-information the way certain noblemen collected snuffboxes — and Balthazar had settled himself heavily at their table with his back to the common room, a position Seraphine had observed he always took, and which she had come to understand was not in fact the tactical error it appeared to be, because Balthazar trusted her and Tobin to watch the room, and he used his turned-back to do a different watching, which was to listen, and to listen with a particular sailor’s ear that could pick out, in the general hum of a common room, the half-note by which a conversation was being performed rather than merely conducted. He was listening now. She could tell from the stillness of his shoulders. Tobin, beside him, was being a grandfather, drawing out the landlord’s wife on the subject of the road conditions and the price of oats and the recent weather, and he was doing it in a manner so entirely benign that the landlord’s wife was confiding in him details of the parish’s private gossip that she would not have confided in her own cousin, which was Tobin’s gift and which Seraphine had also made a note of.
The meal was placed before them. A stew of the predictable sort, bread of the predictable sort, a small pat of butter, a dish of boiled turnips. Seraphine ate as she always ate in public, which was with such restrained economy that no observer could have said, a minute after her dish was cleared, whether she had eaten at all. She ate because it would have been remarked if she had not. She watched the room. She watched the corner. She watched the serving-girl’s trajectories between the tables. She watched the landlord at the bar, and she marked the particular glance he had given the four men when he had taken their order, and the glance contained the small unmistakable flicker of a man who has been paid to look the other way and who is counting the minutes until he can credibly look the other way.
It was time.
She rose. She did not announce her rising. She simply rose, smoothed her skirts, took up her cup of wine, and crossed the common room in the slow unpurposeful drift of a traveler who has seen, across the smoky air, a face she thinks she may perhaps recognize, and who is approaching to settle the question of the recognition before returning to her own table. She did not look at the four men directly as she approached. She looked, rather, at an empty chair a little past their table, as though that were the object of her motion, and then, as she drew level with them, she allowed her gaze to slide, as if by accident, over the face of the second man, the one with the money-belt, and she allowed her step to hesitate, and she allowed her lips to part, and she said, in the tone of a gentlewoman who has made a small happy discovery, “Monsieur Laurin? Surely it is Monsieur Laurin?”
The four men looked up. This was the critical instant, the instant she had been maneuvering toward for the past forty minutes, the instant in which she would learn what she needed to learn. She watched the second man’s face with the whole of her art, which is to say, she did not appear to be watching it. She watched, at the same time, the faces of the other three, each in her peripheral vision, the way a painter watches the whole canvas while his brush addresses one corner of it. The second man’s face did not betray him. He produced, with creditable speed, the small confused half-smile of a man being addressed by a stranger under an unfamiliar name, and he said, “Madame, I regret — I am not Monsieur Laurin. I am Master Huberd, of the Cloth Guild of Estermire. Perhaps you mistake me for another?”
But the third man — the third, ah, the third — had glanced, in the instant before the second man had composed himself, at the first man, and the first man’s eyes had flickered downward to the table with the precise microscopic movement of a man confirming that no item of incriminating character was exposed, and this flicker — this flicker which no ordinary observer would have seen, and which many extraordinary observers would have seen but would not have read correctly — this flicker told Seraphine everything she had needed to know. The first man was the leader. The third man took his cues from the first. The second man, despite the money-belt, was not the senior among them, and had been nominated as the face of the group because of the money-belt, because the money-belt was the theatrical property by which the merchant-role was anchored. And the flicker itself, the small downward confirming glance — that was the flicker of a man whose table had, moments before, contained a document or a token or a map that had been put away when Seraphine had risen, which meant they had seen her rise and had prepared themselves, which meant they had been watching her as she had been watching them, which meant they were professionals of the first rank and not of the second.
She permitted herself a small laugh, the tiny laugh of a gentlewoman who has embarrassed herself pleasantly. “Ah, Master Huberd, forgive me, I do beg your pardon — the light is so poor in these public rooms, and we are so long on the road, and one grows foolish. Monsieur Laurin was a dealer in fine cloths whom I met two summers ago at Valmont, and the resemblance is truly striking. Forgive me again. Your cloths — you deal in cloths? Then perhaps the resemblance is not entirely coincidental, if Estermire and Valmont share a professional fraternity.”
“They do, madame, in some measure,” said Master Huberd, who had composed himself very well indeed. “Though I have not had the honor of making Monsieur Laurin’s acquaintance. Would you do us the further kindness of sitting a moment? A traveling lady far from home is always welcome at a table of plain men of trade.”
He gestured, easily, at the fifth chair which had been placed against the wall at their table. This was the offer she had maneuvered him into making. She noted, without satisfaction — one did not take satisfaction in such things; satisfaction was for the amateurs — that he had made it exactly as she had predicted he would, at approximately the cadence she had predicted, and with the specific word “plain” at the specific position in the sentence where a professional attempting to perform merchanthood would have placed it. Plain was the word such men placed in their sentences when they wished to be underestimated.
“You are kind,” she said. “Briefly, then — for my companions will wonder — but briefly, yes.”
She sat. She did not put down her cup of wine. She held it in her right hand, a little below the level of the table, where its contents, if she wished, could be tilted, and she arranged her left hand upon her lap, where it rested near the dagger-pin at her chest, and she smiled at the four of them, and they smiled at her, and for perhaps fourteen seconds no one spoke.
The first exchange began on the surface of the merchant theater. They were, Master Huberd explained, a small company carrying samples and sealed orders from Estermire to the western trading towns; they had been on the road eleven days; the weather had been indifferent; the roads had been worse than the previous summer; and they had encountered a degree of difficulty at the gates of Haverfold, where a new toll-collector of a particularly unreasonable disposition had insisted upon a fee for which they had not been prepared. She, in turn, explained that she was traveling with four companions on a matter of private business; that she had found the country pleasant; that the hedgerows of the second parish out of Haverfold were particularly well-tended; that she was grateful for the shelter of the Four Winds on a drizzling evening; and that she had been, as was her habit, relieved to find herself a good wine in so remote an establishment, though the wine was, she confessed with another small laugh, perhaps younger than she had hoped.
She watched them during this exchange with the whole of her attention, which appeared to them, and was intended to appear to them, as only half her attention. The second man — Master Huberd — was listening to her with a merchant’s plausible courtesy. The first man, the leader, was listening with a listener’s stillness, the stillness of a man who is not merely absorbing her words but weighing each of them against a hypothesis. The third man had not spoken since she sat down and would not speak the entire evening; she judged him to be the group’s eyes and blade, the man whose only job was to be ready, and she treated him accordingly, which is to say, she gave him her left profile and never her back. The fourth man — the man of the too-long smile — watched her with a different quality of attention altogether, and she recognized its quality at once, because she had been watched in that manner by a hundred men in her professional life, and she understood that he was the group’s seducer, the man whose role it was to attach himself to any female informant who presented herself, and that he had already begun his work.
This was, she noted with the clean clear exhilaration that was now pulsing through her in regular waves beneath the flat surface of her composure, a highly professional team. The Guild that had sent them had sent its competent people. Which meant the Guild that had sent them considered the artifact worth sending competent people after. Which meant the Guild that had sent them knew something about the artifact which she and her companions did not.
“And your business, madame,” Master Huberd said, at what he evidently judged the appropriate moment, “if I may ask — you spoke of a matter of private business — you are bound westward with your companions? It is a hard country, westward. We have come from that direction, and I confess the towns become fewer, the hedgerows less tended, the roads less reliable. If your business permits an inquiry, we would be glad to offer any counsel we may have gathered of the road ahead.”
“You are most kind,” she said, and she inclined her head with a warmth calibrated to suggest the possibility of future trust without the actuality of present confidence. “Our business is a small genealogical matter, Master Huberd. My companions include a scholar of some note, and we are traveling to a collection of old parish records held at a foundation near the forest’s edge, in the hope of tracing a certain line of descent. A dull errand, truly — I apologize for the tedium of it — but a necessary one, for the settlement of a question of inheritance.”
This was a lie she had constructed in its entirety during the walk from her own table to theirs. She watched Master Huberd receive it. He received it well. He nodded with the small polite interest of a man to whom inheritance matters were tedious but understandable. The leader, the first man, did not move his face at all, but she saw — and she would have sworn on any seven gods that she saw — a tiny flicker in his right eye at the word foundation, because the word foundation was not quite the word a genuine inheritance-seeker would have used for a parish-records collection, and because a man who was listening against a hypothesis would catch that small wrong word and register it. He caught it. He registered it. He did not know what it told him, because she had chosen the word deliberately to seem slightly wrong in a way that was consistent with many possible truths, but he had the fact of the wrongness now in his ledger, and she had given it to him on purpose, because she wanted something in his ledger that she had controlled the placement of.
This was the essence of the work. One gave the enemy small controlled pieces of wrongness, placed with care, so that the enemy’s ledger of suspicions was full of entries that one had oneself designed. An enemy with a ledger one had designed was an enemy one could predict. An enemy with a ledger one had not designed was an enemy one could only react to. She preferred the first kind of enemy. She took pains to produce them.
“Ah,” said Master Huberd. “A genealogical matter. Indeed. We have heard — you must forgive a plain merchant’s curiosity, but at the roadside one hears many things — we have heard of a company gone westward on a matter of, shall we say, more vigorous nature, some days ahead of you perhaps. The innkeeper at Seven Ashes two nights past spoke of such a party. Guild-touched, he said. Wore the seal. He thought they might have been bound for the old ruins, though he was a drunkard and I give his testimony no great weight. Have you encountered such a company, madame, on your road?”
She drew the breath of a woman about to answer a question she had not expected, and she held it for the precise length of time that such a breath required, and she let it out, and she said, “We have not, Master Huberd. But it is curious that you should mention it. My scholar is a man of some connection with the guilds of the eastern city, and he was mentioning, only last night, that he had heard a rumor of an artifact sought. Gossip, of course. We do not concern ourselves with such matters. Our errand is quite domestic.”
Now this — this was the dance, this precise exchange was the dance for which she had risen from her own table and crossed the common room and sat down in the fifth chair. Master Huberd had offered her a piece of intelligence — the existence of a rival party, which she had not known about — and he had offered it in the form of a question, so that he could watch her face receive the information. She had received the information with exactly the measure of surprise a woman in her supposed role would have registered, which was a small polite surprise that could be equally well read as genuine ignorance or as pretended ignorance. She had then matched his offering with a counter-offering — the existence of a rumor of the artifact — and had attached to it the small detail that her scholar had heard it, thereby giving him a fact he had wanted (that there was a scholar in her party) in exchange for the fact he had given her (that there was a rival party ahead of them on the road). She had devalued both exchanges by calling them gossip and domestic matters, the linguistic equivalent of sliding the coin across the table and pretending to be uninterested in whether it was accepted. He had devalued his offering in precisely the same way, by attributing it to a drunken innkeeper. They were both being scrupulous about the devaluation, because devaluation was the professional courtesy by which two people who recognized one another as professionals allowed one another to maintain the pretense that they were not.
She watched the leader, the first man, during this exchange. The leader, she saw with a small private pleasure, was pleased. She saw it in the fractional softening of a muscle at the corner of his mouth. The leader was pleased because Master Huberd had played his part well and because she had responded in the expected pattern, and the leader’s professional satisfaction at a textbook exchange had briefly overwhelmed his discipline, and he had permitted himself a tenth of a smile, and she had caught the tenth of a smile, and she had filed it away. A man who let slip a tenth of a smile at a textbook exchange was a man who valued textbook exchanges. A man who valued textbook exchanges was a man who could be manipulated by a non-textbook exchange, delivered at the right moment. She did not yet know what the non-textbook exchange would be, or when she would deliver it. But she now knew that the vulnerability existed, and she would hold the knowledge of the vulnerability in reserve, and she would use it later, or perhaps not, or perhaps she would use it now, depending on what the rest of the evening produced.
“A scholar,” said Master Huberd, as though the detail had only just struck him. “How fortunate for you. What is your scholar’s field, madame, if one may ask?”
“Ecclesiastical paleography, principally,” she said, at once. “Old parchment, old ink. He is particularly expert in the hands of the eastern foundations of the ninth and tenth centuries. A dry discipline, but he is very eminent in it, though perhaps not famous — eminent men of his type rarely are.”
Every word of this was a small calibrated parcel. Ecclesiastical paleography was consistent with a genealogical errand; it was also a discipline in which a scholar of Aldric’s general description would be credible; it was also a discipline entirely innocent of any connection to the artifact they were in fact seeking, so that she was not giving the four men any lead toward the true nature of their expertise. She had made Aldric unfamous deliberately, because a famous scholar could be checked, and a famous scholar’s absence from his expected haunts could be checked, and she did not want her scholar checkable.
“Ah,” said Master Huberd. “A fine discipline.” He did not pursue it. He had not the vocabulary to pursue it, and he knew he had not the vocabulary to pursue it, and he knew that she knew, and so he let it pass as the small irrelevant detail she had framed it as. But the leader of their table, she noticed — the leader’s eyes had flickered, at the phrase ecclesiastical paleography, with a particular small flicker that told her the leader did have the vocabulary. The leader knew what ecclesiastical paleography was. The leader was a man of education beyond the ordinary. She filed this fact away with the others. The leader of this rival questing party was a scholar, or had been trained among scholars. Which narrowed considerably, in her mental ledger, the number of guilds or agencies that might have sent them.
The fourth man — the seducer — leaned forward now with the lean-forward he had earlier practiced on the serving-girl, and he said, in a voice smoothed to the exact consistency of warmed honey, “Madame, I must confess I have been unable to attend properly to this conversation, because I have been attempting to place your perfume. It is unusual. Jasmine, and something else — perhaps a cedar — I am an enthusiast of such things. Might I ask the house?”
She turned her attention to him with the smallest indulgent tilt of her head, which was the gesture by which one permitted a man’s flirtation without accepting it. She was not wearing perfume. She had not worn perfume since leaving Valmont, for the reason that perfume made a person identifiable in a manner one did not always wish to be. She said, “You are generous, sir, but I wear no perfume on the road. You must be detecting the lavender of the inn’s linen-press, which is, I confess, more distinguished than one had any right to expect in so remote a house.”
He laughed, a practiced laugh, and said, “The linen, then. The linen. I stand corrected.” And he leaned back, and he held her eyes for just a half-second too long, and she returned the half-second with exactly matched duration, neither longer nor shorter, so that he should not be able to decide whether she had received his attention or not. Ambiguity, in such exchanges, was the most expensive coin in the purse. She spent it here.
The leader now, for the first time, spoke. His voice, when it came, was precisely the voice she had expected it would be — low, cultivated, without accent, the voice of a man who had learned to remove all regional marks from his speech the way a professional washed his hands. He said, “Madame, it has been a pleasure. We will not detain you from your companions. May we offer you, as small recompense for the interruption of your meal, a cup of the better wine from our own provision? We carry a little Valmontois for emergencies of hospitality.”
He said Valmontois. He said it with a small deliberate pressure upon the second syllable, the pressure native to that province, the pressure that no outsider would produce. She heard it. He had meant her to hear it. He was telling her, without telling her, that he knew where she was from. He was giving her a small controlled piece of his own wrongness — showing her that he had placed her accent — and he was watching to see how she received the piece.
She received it. She permitted her eyes to widen fractionally, the widening of a woman who has been agreeably surprised by a small courtesy, and she said, “How very kind. A small cup, then. I am touched that a merchant of Estermire carries Valmontois on the road.”
“One develops a taste, on the road,” said the leader, “for small comforts from elsewhere.”
A steward’s bottle was produced. It was, she noted, a genuine Valmontois, and of a creditable year. The leader poured it himself, with the slow precision of a man who had poured many such measures, and he filled her cup with exactly the courtesy with which he would have filled the cup of a woman he was about to kill. She understood this. She was not disturbed by this. The courtesy of the pour was not insincere; it was the professional’s genuine courtesy toward another professional whom circumstances might or might not require one to harm. Such courtesies were among the few pleasures of the profession, and she took them where they came.
She raised the cup. “To safe roads,” she said.
“To safe roads,” said the leader.
Master Huberd echoed it; the third man echoed it without looking up; the fourth man echoed it with his long smile. They drank. The wine was, as she had expected, not poisoned. Poisoning would have been an amateur’s move; the leader was not an amateur. The wine was, however, a gesture of recognition. In the code of their profession, the sharing of a private provision of one’s own country’s wine with a stranger one had identified across the provincial line was the equivalent of the handshake by which two dueling masters acknowledged one another before proceeding to the engagement. She had been acknowledged. She returned the acknowledgment by finishing the cup with exactly the appropriate speed, and setting it down with exactly the appropriate placement of the base, and rising with exactly the appropriate thanks.
“Gentlemen,” she said. “You have been more kind than I deserved. I wish you safe roads yourselves, and good trade.”
“Good evening, madame,” said Master Huberd.
“Madame,” said the leader, with the smallest possible incline.
The fourth man let his smile linger as she turned away. She did not reward it. She walked back across the common room in the same unpurposeful drift with which she had approached, and she resumed her chair at her own table, and she resumed her cup of the thin young red wine of the house, and she did not look at the corner table again, and she did not need to, because she now possessed every piece of information about the corner table that the corner table was willing to give her, and some pieces it had not meant to give her, and she was, for the remainder of the evening, free to turn her attention to the much more interesting question of what her own companions had observed while she had been absent.
Aldric, she saw at once, had observed a great deal. His quill had not moved in the fifteen minutes she had been gone, and his eyes were on his page, and he had clearly been using the polished back of his inkwell to monitor the reflection of the corner, and he had probably understood, by the small cues, the rough shape of what had passed. He said, without looking up, “Your errand, madame, was productive?”
“Sufficient, Brother,” she said. “The foundation of old records at the forest’s edge grows daily more interesting.”
He understood her. She saw him understand her. He made a small mark at the margin of his page — a notation she could not read from her angle, but which she judged was the beginning of an entry on tonight’s events in his private chronicle. She did not mind him making the entry. She would, at some later point, ask him not to record certain particulars; he would comply; the record would be the better for his compliance. She trusted him. This was, she noticed with something that she did not permit herself to name surprise, a thing she had not quite expected to be true. She trusted him. She did not yet trust Ysolde, and she did not yet trust Balthazar, though she respected them both; she had been a fool about trusting Tobin already and would have to review that conclusion; but Aldric she trusted, because Aldric had the particular quality of scholars of genuine eminence, which was that he was more interested in being accurate than in being victorious, and a man who preferred accuracy to victory could be confided in without supervision.
Balthazar, whose back had been to the common room, was now saying, under his breath, in the particular muttered cadence she had come to recognize as his analytical voice, “Four of them. Two who’ve drawn steel recently. The quiet one’s the sharp edge. The smiler’s an ear. Money-belt’s the face. Man in the far chair’s the captain.” She heard it. She did not respond to it. Balthazar had produced this assessment without once having looked at the table, and he had produced it by listening to the cadence of their voices alone, and he had produced it with an accuracy of ninety-five percent — the only thing he had missed was that the third man was not only the sharp edge but specifically the leader’s own sworn blade, a detail she had inferred from a small deference in the third man’s posture when the leader had reached for the Valmontois bottle. She would tell Balthazar about it later. He would enjoy the correction. He enjoyed corrections from people he respected. She had become, in the course of the journey, a person he respected. This had been a quiet and not unwelcome surprise.
Tobin, who had been engaged the entire time in deep conversation with the landlord’s wife, now drifted back to their table and sat down beside Ysolde with his easy heavy settling, and he said, to no one in particular, “The landlord’s wife tells me that party of merchants came in this afternoon about an hour before we did, and they paid in silver up front for two rooms and a bath, and they’ve already paid for tomorrow’s breakfast and stabling, which is a thing merchants don’t often do because it locks up their coin and most of them prefer to settle in the morning. She thinks they’re strange. She thinks they’re quiet in a way that isn’t restful. She doesn’t like the smiling one. She says the smiling one offered her daughter a coin to carry a message to the stables for him yesterday evening, and she refused on the girl’s behalf, and the smiling one didn’t like being refused, and she’s going to keep the girl close to the kitchen for the rest of the evening, if we don’t mind.”
Seraphine looked at Tobin. Tobin looked back. She felt, for the second time that day, the peculiar shift in her face that she had felt when Ysolde had spoken of the short-weighting cheesemonger — the shift that her own father had once, long ago, called her “softening below the glass,” meaning that underneath the surface of her courtly composure, something was yielding without her permission. She permitted the softening. She did not let it reach her face. She said, quietly, to Tobin, “Please tell the landlord’s wife that we will, if she wishes, keep an eye on the kitchen door this evening on her behalf. She need not mention the arrangement to anyone.”
“I already did,” said Tobin.
“Of course you did,” she said.
Ysolde had returned from her kitten-reconnaissance of the bar by this point, and she slid in beside Tobin, and she looked from face to face around the table, and she picked up the tenor of the evening with the speed of a woman who has been scouting for her whole life, and she said, lightly, “So what’d I miss, then?”
“A small masquerade,” said Seraphine. “In the corner. Four gentlemen who are not what they claim to be. They are a rival questing party, of considerable professional quality, sent by a guild or agency that knew to send its best. They are ahead of us in one sense — they have already been informed that our company is on the road — but they are behind us in another, for we now know that they are here, and they do not yet know that we know.”
Ysolde let out a long low whistle, the whistle of a scout receiving news from a better-placed scout. “How good are they?”
“Very good,” said Seraphine. “The leader is a man of education. The third man is a blade. The fourth is an ear. The face is adequate.”
“Will they move against us tonight?”
“No,” said Seraphine, and she said it with the confidence of her whole reading of the evening. “Not tonight. They will want to observe us. They will want to know how many we are, what our horses can do, what our tempers are, whether any of us drinks too much or speaks too loosely. They will watch us tonight, and they will leave before we do in the morning, and they will attempt to reach the ruins ahead of us by perhaps one day, and we will then have to decide whether to attempt to overtake them or to let them enter the ruins first and inherit whatever trap the ruins have prepared for the first comers.”
“The ruins prepare traps for first comers?” said Ysolde.
“The ruins, according to the seventh chapter, are guarded by beings that do not know when they sleep. First comers wake them. Second comers reap what the first comers have stirred.”
“Ah,” said Ysolde. “That’s dirty.”
“It is very dirty,” said Seraphine, with the nearest thing to affection she permitted her voice. “It is also, in certain circumstances, wise. I have not yet decided. I will want to hear Tobin’s thoughts on it, and Aldric’s, and Balthazar’s, and yours, at a different table, at a later hour, when our observers are asleep or pretending to be.”
“Agreed,” said Ysolde. “Now — tell me about the fourth one. The ear. What does he look like?”
And Seraphine told her, in a low and exact voice, keeping her eyes on her own wine-cup as she spoke, the details of the fourth man: his height, his build, the color of his hair in the inn’s poor light, the position of a small scar beneath his left eye, the make of his boots (which were, despite the merchant-pretense, a nobleman’s boots resoled in the common fashion), the gold ring on the fourth finger of his right hand (which bore a device too small to resolve at the distance she had been working from but which she suspected was a cipher of one of the northern courts), and the thing she had noticed about his thumb (a faint old callus in the web between thumb and forefinger, such as a man acquires from the long habitual handling of a poniard pommel). Ysolde listened, and she nodded, and Seraphine saw with satisfaction that Ysolde was committing the description to memory with the particular efficient ease of a woman who had been committing descriptions to memory since childhood. Ysolde, Seraphine reminded herself, had not lived the sheltered life her open face and easy laugh were designed to suggest. Something had taught Ysolde to memorize a face the first time she heard it described, and Seraphine had made a second note, now, to find out at the right moment what.
The evening proceeded. She ate a little of the bread. She drank a little more of the thin young red. She conducted, at their table, a small ordinary conversation about the quality of the road westward, the condition of the horses, the likelihood of rain on the following day, and she conducted this small ordinary conversation with one quarter of her attention, which was entirely sufficient for the purpose, while with the remaining three quarters she watched the corner, and she watched the landlord, and she watched the kitchen door, and she watched the stair that led up to the upper gallery, and she watched, above all, the four men at the corner table, who watched her and her party with a professionalism that was, she had to admit, impressive enough to have been a true pleasure in any less consequential circumstance.
At one point during the evening, the leader rose and went to the stair, as though to retire early; she watched him go, and she watched him return, and she noted that he had been gone exactly four minutes, which was not enough time to retire, and which was sufficient time to have written a short message, rolled it, and entrusted it to a man or a bird in the stable-yard. A bird, she judged; they would not have a man, on this road, who was not already at their table. Which meant they had birds. Which meant they had prepared for this mission at considerable expense. Which meant the guild or agency that had sent them valued this artifact at a very high price. Which meant her own guild, the guild that had sent her own company, had either been outbid on this knowledge or had withheld it for its own reasons, and the second, she had long suspected, was the more likely.
She did not permit herself to think about her own guild, not tonight. That was a conversation for a later chapter, at a different table, with her companions all present. Tonight she had work to do, and the work was the small cool constant attention required to make sure that none of her four companions, singly or in combination, betrayed themselves to the corner table by any of the small betrayals into which the untrained fell. Tobin would not betray anyone; he had done this before, in some former life he did not discuss. Aldric would not betray anyone so long as he was left with his quill. Balthazar would not betray anyone provided no one gave him the opportunity to start a fight, which no one in the corner was going to do, because the corner was observing and not engaging. Ysolde was the variable. Ysolde laughed too loud when she was nervous. Ysolde was not nervous yet, but she might become so at some moment during the evening, and the too-loud laugh would tell the corner everything it needed to know about her. Seraphine kept her eye on Ysolde. Ysolde did not laugh too loud. Ysolde laughed the correct amount, because Ysolde was smarter than Seraphine had given her credit for in the first twelve hours of their acquaintance, and had been watching Seraphine watch the corner and had adjusted her laugh accordingly.
Another note for the ledger. Ysolde, too, was trained in something. Not in the professions Seraphine had been trained in; in something else; in some country art that had taught her, among other things, when to hold her laugh. Seraphine looked forward to knowing what it was. She would not ask. Ysolde would tell her when Ysolde was ready.
At last the hour grew late. The landlord’s wife began, with the ritual movements of such women, to gather cups and wipe down tables in that preliminary way that indicated to lingering parties that the house would prefer to retire. The four men at the corner rose first, with cordial good-nights to the landlord and a cordial bowing nod in the direction of Seraphine’s table, which she returned with the precisely matched cordiality that betrayed nothing. They went up the stair. She watched them go. She counted their treads. She noted which door closed at which position along the upper gallery. She noted, also, that the leader’s tread was half a beat out of sync with the others, which could have been because he was carrying something of uneven weight, or because he was deliberately breaking cadence to signal to an unseen watcher in the yard that he had gone up, or because his left knee was weaker than his right — probably the last. She filed each of the three possibilities for later confirmation.
When the four had gone and the common room was empty but for her own company and the yawning landlord, she turned to her companions and she said, in a low voice that carried no further than the table, “Upstairs, we will not speak of any of this. Our rooms will be listened to, if only by the walls themselves, and in a house such as this the walls have ears and the floors have eyes and even the bed-linen has loyalties. We will speak in the stable-yard, tomorrow morning, before dawn, while we are saddling. I will wake you each in turn. Say nothing of the corner table to one another between now and then, not even in whispers. Confirm you understand.”
Tobin nodded once. Aldric closed his tome with the softest possible click of the clasp and nodded. Balthazar grunted, which was his nod. Ysolde said, quietly, “Aye.” Each of them understood. Each of them had understood before she had spoken. She had told them anyway because the telling of it was itself a small professional ritual by which a party confirmed that it was a party and not merely four strangers and a knife at a table. She had spoken the ritual because the ritual had been handed down to her by her own teachers, and she had been honoring her teachers by passing it along. This was the other kind of pleasure her profession afforded her. She took it.
They went up, by separate intervals, to their separate rooms.
She lay down in her own room, in the narrow bed provided, with the door bolted and the window latched and the dagger-pin unpinned from her chest and set beside her upon the pillow, and she did not sleep. She did not intend to sleep, not until she had heard each of the four men in the corridor move, heard each of them settle, heard each of them begin the particular slowed breathing of men who were either asleep or pretending to be, and heard, further, the landlord complete his last rounds and bolt the outer doors and settle in his own quarters. She heard all of this, in its due time. She noted that the third man — the blade — did not sleep. She could hear, at intervals, the minute shift of him turning his weight upon his mattress. He was keeping watch. She had expected him to. She lay awake for another hour, while he kept watch, and she listened to the silences between his shifts, and she allowed herself, at last, in that wakeful watchful dark, the private pleasure she had been denying herself all evening, which was simply to recognize that she had enjoyed the work.
She had enjoyed it with a cleanness she had not felt in a long time. At the Valmont-Lissarian court she had done work of this kind for people whose purposes she had by degrees come to doubt, and in those years the pleasure had curdled into something she did not wish to revisit. In the employments that had followed her departure from that court, she had done work of this kind for people whose purposes she had not troubled herself to know, and the pleasure had been there but had been cold, and she had not enjoyed its coldness. Tonight, for the first time in many evenings, she had done the work for people whose purposes were her own — for Tobin, who she did not yet understand but whom she had decided to trust; for Aldric, whose honest chronicling she had made a small silent vow to protect; for Balthazar, whose mutters she had come to find strangely consoling; and for Ysolde, whose laugh she did not want the corner table to hear, not tonight, not on any night. She had done the work for them. And the pleasure of having done the work for them — the clean cold exhilaration of having recognized the enemy across the smoky room and having conducted the full dance of acknowledgment and counter-acknowledgment without dropping a step — was a pleasure she had almost forgotten existed.
She listened to the third man shift on his mattress again. She listened to the rain, which had resumed, drumming lightly on the slate roof above her. She listened to her own slow steady breathing. She thought, with the small private smile she permitted only herself, and only in the dark:
They are good. We are better. We are better because they are four men sent by a guild, and we are five souls who sat down at a tavern two days ago as strangers and who have already begun, without any of us quite agreeing to it, to become something that a guild cannot assemble and an agency cannot purchase. They do not know this about us. They cannot know this about us, because a thing like this does not announce itself. It only emerges, at certain tables, on certain evenings, under certain pressures, and we are emerging now, and by the time they understand what we have become, it will be too late for them to adjust, and that will be the moment — not tomorrow, not at the ruins, but in some particular evening I cannot yet see — when I will deliver the non-textbook exchange I have been holding in reserve, and the leader with the educated eye will be, for one critical breath, off his cadence, and in that breath the five of us will do whatever the five of us are about to discover we can do together, and the Vale will be ours and not theirs, not because we deserve it more, but because we have become a thing they did not prepare for.
She closed her eyes, in the dark, in the narrow bed, in the small watched inn at the meeting of four roads. She did not sleep. She rested. Her right hand remained within four inches of the dagger-pin upon the pillow. Her left hand lay composed upon her breast, over the place where three porcelain masks on silver chains would have hung, had she not removed them before lying down. She felt, where the masks were not, the small cool place upon her sternum that the masks had warmed during the day. She thought about the four men in the corridor. She thought about the red-cheeked landlord’s wife keeping the daughter close to the kitchen. She thought about Aldric’s small marginal mark. She thought about Balthazar’s mutter. She thought about Tobin’s nod. She thought about Ysolde’s correctly pitched laugh. She thought:
This. This is the work. This is the work I was born for, and which the courts had soured for me, and which I had abandoned for coin, and which I had begun to believe I had lost the taste for. I had not lost the taste. I had only been working for the wrong table. There is, it turns out, a right table. It has five chairs. I am at one of them. Tomorrow I will sit at it again.
Outside, the rain went on. Inside, the third man shifted once more, patient, professional, at his watch. She listened to him shift, and she smiled in the dark, the tiny smile that was for no one, and she thought, at him, across the corridor, across the wall, across the whole patient architecture of their mutual attentive silence: I know you are awake. I know you know I am awake. Rest well, sir. We have a long day tomorrow. And if the gods are good, we shall meet again upon the road, and I shall have the pleasure of finishing what we began tonight in the corner of the Four Winds, at an hour and a place of my choosing, which will not be, I am afraid, at an hour or a place of yours.
She lay awake a little longer. She rested. The exhilaration did not leave her. It burned, beneath her composure, with the small clean flame of a candle one has lit deliberately in a careful lantern, and she tended it, through the long watches of the rainy provincial night, until at last, perhaps an hour before dawn, she permitted herself to sleep, lightly, shallowly, the way she had been taught to sleep in a watched house, the way she had been sleeping for more than half of her life, the way she would, she now understood, be sleeping with great contentment for whatever remained of it.
Segment 6: Of the Chronicler’s Doubts Beneath the Stars
Now herken, gentils, for the nyght was deep, And foure of my companions were aslepe Within our campe-ring, which we had that day Pitched in a hollow by the westward way, Some fyve-and-twenty leagues from Haverfold, Wher roads ygrow more lonesome, and the cold Of eventide doth bite a little keen Ageyn the promise of the summer-scheen. We had ridden on from that strange fyve-roads inn Wher Seraphine had fought her silent synne Of courtesies with four men in the corner, And we had ridden onward, lyke the mourner Who buryeth by day and walks by night, Pretendyng all is well. The sun was bright Upon the road, and Ysolde sang aloud, And Balthazar rode grumblyng, and the croud Of our small fellowship seemed merry-like Unto a passing stranger. But the pyke Of inward knowing stucke within us all, That in some mile ahead a watchful wall Of enemies rode somewhere on the waye, And in some mile behynd, the Guild’s relaye Of messengers might yet be carrying False word of us to those who’d have us ryng A bell we did not yet fully comprehend. So to this hollow, at the day’s soft end, We fyve had come, and pitched our fyres, and eaten Such provender as Tobin’s pot had beaten Into a stew of passable array, And speke a little, drowsily, of the day, And one by one had laid them doune to slepe, Wrapt in their bedrolls, while the night grew deepe.
But I, Aldric the chronicler, I sate Beside the banked-doune embers, and my slate Of occupations did not yet allow me Repose. My quill was oute. My tome was nowe Upon my lappe, and by the embers’ light, Augmented by the taper I had bright- ly lit and set upon a flattened stone, I did my nightly work, which is myne own: To writ the day just passed. To catalog What had been seen. To mark within my log The small observings that might later come To signify some greater sum of summ. This was my charge. The Clerk had bid me so: Record. Record. Record. And on I go, Night after night, beside whatever blaze We kindle on our fyve-fold winding wayes.
But on this night, I did not writ the day. I wrote, and scratched it out. I set array Of lines, and crossed them. I began a page Three times, and thrice I folded oute the sage Grey vellum, and I stared into the fire, And I did feel, beneath my rib-attire, A slow ignoble worme of scholar’s doubt Begynne to gnaw at me, from in to out.
For I had, two hours ere, among my packs, Produced the Chronicle of Ancients’ blacks- Letter edition which the Guild had pressed Upon me at the hall, which I had dressed In oilcloth for the journey, and which I Had promised myself I sholde scrutinize As we drew near the Vale. And now we drew Near enough. And so, with candle new Uncovered, I unwrapped the tome, and spread Its seventh chapter’s pages, and I read, And read again, and then, my gentils, read A third time, more slow, my forefynger led Acrosse each line, the way a scholar reads When something nags him, when the reading needs To be not just absorbed, but interrogated. And with each reading, my unease dilated.
Now I shal telle ye why. Bear wi’ me, pray, For this is scholar’s business, and the way Of it is slow, and ye must have some patience With my small parchment-stained elucidation, Because the thing I found, I found by pieces, Not all at once. It came by slow increases.
A chapter, ye must understand, is writ In one of several hands: either the knit Of the original author’s pen, preserved By copyists through ages, rightly served, So that the hand ye read is still the hand Of him who first did write, albeit scanned Through many intermediates of ink; Or else a chapter hath been passed, I think, Through editorial hands of later date, Who have, at certain moments, interpolate Their own corrections, annotations, glosses, And in the worst case, their own private losses And gains of meaning, smuggled in unseen Beside the author’s genuine demesne. A practiced scholar learns to tell the two Apart by many signs: the meter’s cue, The rhyme-scheme’s inconsistency, the word Whose usage is of later vintage, stirred Into a broth of older diction where It does not fit; the sudden change of air Between one stanza and the next, as though Two winds were blowing through the page, and no Single breath moved all the lines together.
Such were the signs I sought, and in the weather Of the seventh chapter, such I found.
I found them first in one small place: the sound Of the fourth stanza. Ye recall it well, For I have set it doun before: that swell Which reads, “To quell the specters, steel won’t do, / Magic alone can see thee through.” It’s true, At surface glance, a workmanlike small verse, Consistent with the Chaucer-ish coerce Of diction that the chapter holds throughout. And yet — and yet — I read it with my doubt Engaged, and I began to hear the beat Of it as out of step with the neat Iambic pentametric foot the rest Of the chapter hath preserved. For to attest: “Magic alone can see thee through” is four Stressed beats, not five. And further, “steel won’t do” Is marked by an apostrophic contraction Of a kind the rest of the chapter’s diction Does not admit. Throughout the entire spire Of the seventh chapter, no other contracted fire Of “won’t” or “don’t” or “can’t” doth mar the page. The diction is consistent, stage by stage, In its preference for uncontracted form. Why, then, does this one stanza break the norm?
I will tell ye why. It is because some hand, Some later hand, some hand that did not stand Within the original compositional school, Has written this stanza in. Not as a fool Would do it, but as a hurried editor Working under pressure, to restore Or to insert some necessary piece Of lore before the publication’s release. It is an interpolation. I will stake My modest reputation on its make. And here — and here is where the scholar’s dread Begynneth — here is where the slow-grown thread Of doubt becometh rope of certainty — Here is the question. If this stanza be An interpolation, then what was it for? What did the interpolator wish to store Within the chapter that the chapter lacked? And what, if anything, did the original tract Say in its stead, before the later hand Erased it and inscribed this softer band Of “magic alone can see thee through”?
Let us consider what the stanza seems to do. It warns the questing party that steel’s not enough; That spectral guardians require a rough Accompaniment of magical fire to fall. It is a practical advisement, all In all. A caution to the cautious-minded. It tells the quester what to be reminded Of, when packing for the journey: bring Thy magic, not thy blade alone. A thing Any competent guild clerk might have slipt Into a chapter, to be sure the script Prepared its reader properly for the foe.
But wait. Go slowly. Take the stanza slow. Read it again. “To quell the specters, steel won’t do, Magic alone can see thee through.”
Quell.
That is the word. Quell. It is a word Of particular shade, and having heard It placed within this stanza, I can not Unhear it. Quell is not a word that thought Itself a synonym for slay, or smite, Or overcome, or banish. Quell is quite Specific. To quell is to suppress. To calm. To force a thing which doth have life and qualm Into stillness. Ye quell a riot. Quell a fire. Ye quell, my gentils, not a spectral ire That is a hostile enemy to be defeated, But rather a spectral presence to be seated, Set doune, held still, contained within its place. Quell is a binder’s word. Quell has the face Of ritual about it. And the word Within this stanza’s small interpolative herd Of other words, is the quiet tell by which The interpolator hath fallen into pitch With his true subject. He hath used the verb That the rest of the Guild’s officialdom would curb From any open circulation. Quell. It is, my gentils, a binding-word. A spell Of suppression. Not a sword-word. Not a slayer. The specters are not foes. They are wayor’s Of some ancient continuing vigil. They must be Not overcome, but put back into their sea Of silence. That is what the stanza says If ye read it with the editor’s scholar-gaze.
And that is only the first of many tells. Now that the stanza had struck me like a bell, I read the chapter backward and forward twice, And I began to see — as though the vice Of some optical illusion had been lifted, And all the chapter’s pieces now were shifted Into a true alignment — I began To see the pattern of an editor’s plan.
Consider, next, the fragment set in quotes. The chapter has four passages in quotes, As though the chronicler quoted from some older text: “In realms of old, where specters dwell,” the next, “Seek not this place, ye mortals frail,” the third, “Beware the guard of ancient might,” the bird- Like fourth, “In shadows’ heart, the truth concealed.” Four quoted fragments. And this I have seen held In many ancient chronicles: a quoted Fragment, offset from the main, is voted Into the page as a citation drawn From an older, purportedly authentic, drawn- Out source. Such fragments are, in theory, the True words of the original, while the remaining Chronicle is commentary. But I am no Small novice. I have read too many slow Chapters in too many chronicles to be fooled. The true test of whether a “quoted” fragment’s schooled By actual antiquity is this: does it, in its own Internal diction, differ from the grown Modern voice of the surrounding text? Does it Have archaic inflections? Does it sit A generation older in its phrasing?
And here, my gentils, here — here is the blazing Red lamp that calls the scholar to attention — Here is where the editor, in the tension Of his hasty work, did leave his greatest tell — These four quoted fragments do not smell Of older diction. They are, in their voice, Identical to the surrounding text. The choice Of “specters” in the first fragment, “mortals frail” In the second, “guard of ancient might” regale The third, “shadows’ heart” the fourth — these are All modern-middle phrases. Nowhere a far Archaic form. Nowhere a true old word. They are, my gentils, fake quotations. A bird In borrowed feathers. The editor has written These “ancient” fragments himself, and smitten Them with the outer garment of antiquity, While their inner texture is of the activity Of a living modern pen. They are lies. Small lies. Small dressed-up lies, whose clever guise Is a costume thrown over the writer’s hand.
And now I ask, my gentils: what was planned By these four small dressed-up lies? Why did The editor go to this trouble? What was hid In these false antiquities that the chapter Needed authoritative ancient rapture To dress in? What was being authorized By the ventriloquist-editor’s disguised Ancient voice?
The answer lies in what these fragments say. Read them together. See what they convey As a set, ignoring for a moment what Their enclosing chapter has. The first hut Of a fragment gives: “In realms of old, where specters dwell, / Lies secrets deep, which none can tell.” Right well. A warning: there are secrets, they cannot be told. The second: “Seek not this place, ye mortals frail, / Where specters rise, and souls bewail. / Yet, if thy heart Be stout and bold, the Vale’s grim secrets may unfold.” A further warning, then a qualified invitation: Do not go — unless ye are suitable — in that case, Do go. The third: “Beware the guard of ancient might, / Their spectral forms, in endless night.” A caution: Be careful of the guards. The fourth: “In shadows’ heart, The truth concealed. / The magic’s key, from fate revealed. / To walk this path, be brave and wise, / For ancient power, In silence lies.” The thematic culmination: There is a truth in shadow; there is a key Which fate will grant; and ancient power rests In silence. Ye must be brave and wise.
These four fragments, considered together, Form a precise operational template. Weather Or no, the quester should go. The quester should be Brave and wise. The quester should grasp the key. The quester should take power from silence. Aye. That is the structure. And every one of the nigh Four fragments encourages the quester onward. None of them discourages. The flag of “Seek not” Is immediately rescinded by the “Yet, if thy heart / Be stout.” The warning is hedged into an invitation. The doubt Is turned into a challenge. The danger is framed As glory. And the thing to be retrieved is named As power. As ancient power. Not artifact, not key, Not relic, but power. The quoted fragments tell the quester To take the power.
But the surrounding chapter — the un-quoted surround — Speaks of an artifact. An artifact. A found Object of historical interest, to be retrieved And studied at the guild. The quoted “ancient” bereaved Fragments speak of power, and taking power, and silence Concealing keys. And this shift in vocabulary, From artifact to power, is not minor. It is the whole Of the question. An artifact is a thing ye pole Out of a ruin and bring home in a bag. A power is something quite other. Ye do not drag A power into a bag. A power binds, or is bound. A power is channeled. A power is harnessed, round, Contained, suppressed, quelled, released, or taken up. The choice of the word “power,” in the ventriloquist cup Of these four fake-ancient fragments, is the editor’s Private semantic leak, the secret his competitor’s Eye was meant not to catch, but which I, Aldric, Who have spent my life reading editors’ tricks, Caught.
The quest, my gentils, is not for an artifact. The quest is for a power. The guild is tact- Fully speaking in the common tongue of “artifact,” While the older writ, or the editor’s own pact With himself, whispers “power” through the lyre Of the stanza’s quoted inner fire.
And then — and then — one more thing. Ye will forgive Me that I dwell. A scholar’s proofs must live Or die by their accumulation. Here is the third. The phrase in the very last stanza: “ancient power, / In silence lies.” This is a phrase whose structure I recognize. It is a formula. I have seen it, friends, in rites Of binding from the second age, whose sundry sites Have been excavated by the paleographic guild Of Miren, wherein the standard formula, distilled, Runs: “Where power silent lies, there bind it lie.” A ritual command: where power lies silent, the party Binding it must lie it down further, that is, bind it Deeper into its silence. The editor has fined it From the raw formula to a phrase that sounds poetic To the casual reader, while to the aesthetic Palate of a trained scholar, it retains the old Binding grammar. “In silence lies.” The word is sold Two ways: lies, meaning rests; and lies, meaning shall be Laid down. A pun, a deliberate clerkly pun, a key For those who have the other key already.
Now sits the chronicler, steady, unsteady, Beside his fire, with his tome before him, With his small candle-taper flickering for him, With his four companions asleep around him, And with this slow-amassing knowing doune him Like lead into a well.
The quest is a binding. The guild has sent us to perform a ritual finding Which is actually a ritual binding. The power to be bound is old and has, somehow, Begun to stir, or threaten to stir, or make vow Of stirring. The specters are not enemies but Guardians of the binding, whose ancient strut Has kept the power in its silence. They will Resist our meddling — because our meddling, at the still Center of the rite, is in fact a renewal Or a tightening of the binding that their dual Purpose has upheld for these many thousand years. They do not wish us to complete the rite. Their fears May be that we will fail. Their fears may also be That we will succeed — but succeed in the way the Guild hath decree- Ed, which is not the way the binding was first fashioned. For I now strongly suspect the Guild’s passioned Revision of the rite will bind the power in a way Different — subtly different, but different — from the way It was first bound by the ancient civilization That built the Vale. They did one binding. The Guild’s new nation Of clerks wants to perform a second, layered over The first, perhaps tighter, perhaps different in flavor, Perhaps — and this is the thought that chills me most — Perhaps redirecting the power into a host Of their own choosing. Which would mean the rite Is not a binding of preservation but a binding of might, Transferring that ancient power out of its old Custodial vessel into whatever new mould The Guild has prepared for it.
O, gentils, hearken. If I am right, and not Mistaken in my reading — if my scholar’s knot Of inference hath not unravelled itself Into paranoia’s useless shelf — Then we, the fyve of us, have been dispatched As unwitting co-conspirators, matched To a rite whose true consequence we do not know, To bind a power which may have been, long years ago, Bound for excellent reason by people wiser than we, And which the Guild now covets for its own key Purposes, which purposes have not been shared With us. We have been told the quest is bared To us in its entirety. We have been told the artefact Is to be returned for study. We have been tact- Fully deceived. Even the Clerk’s warning, Though honest within its lights, did not reach the morning Of what the editor of this chapter hath hidden. The Clerk suspected we were being bidden To a binding. The Clerk did not suspect — or did not say — That we might be being bidden to a transfer. Nay, Perhaps the Clerk did suspect, and simply did not have The words for it, because such matters require the staves Of scholar-training that a clerk does not possess. And that, my gentils, is why the Clerk bade me confess To record, record, record. Because he knew he was too Small of learning to catch all the snares. He knew There must be a scholar. And he chose me.
Ye will ask, reader, whether I am sure. I am sure Within the zone of certainty a scholar’s pure Methodology affordeth him, which is to say, I am very sure but not absolutely, and the way Of wisdom is to hold one’s conclusions tight But not too tight, in case some further light Produce a datum I have not yet absorbed Which will refute my reading. I do not the scorbed Certainty of the zealot claim. I have the weighted Confidence of the expert, which is, when stated In the scholarly fashion, this: it is more likely than not, And indeed more likely than most, that this chapter’s plot Has been revised by a later editor for the purpose Of dispatching ignorant questers to effect a purpose Other than the one the questers have been told. That Is the reading I shal put beside my name. Flat. That is what I shal carry to the evenyng fire Of tomorrow, or the night after, when our choir Of fyve hath paused again to compare our notes. That is what I shal set before Tobin’s coats Of patient listening, before Seraphine’s sharp mind, Before Balthazar’s muttering, before Ysolde’s kind Wideness of heart. That is what I shal give To my companions, so that together we may live Or die or decide by the full weight of the knowing, Rather than by the partial weight of the Guild’s showing.
And ye will ask, reader, how this findeth me. I will tell ye. It findeth me frightened. To be Frightened is not unscholarly. To be frightened is, In fact, in the presence of a conclusion such as this, The mark of a scholar still in possession of his senses. A scholar who reaches such a reading and commences To feel no fear is a scholar who has not understood His own reading. Fear is, in its way, the one good Proof that one’s reading has penetrated to the moral Depth of the text. The text is not a literary quarrel In itself. The text is a map. The map describes A terrain. The terrain is a place where people may be scribed As dying or imprisoned or made instruments Of a power they did not know they served. One’s fear in those moments Is the healthy response of the soul to the knowledge That one’s own path may traverse such a wordage Of terrain. I am, therefore, properly frightened. I do not hide this from myself. My hand has tightened Upon the quill, and my breath has slowed, and the fire Before me has ceased to be a friendly pyre And has become the small and uncertain light By which I prepare my witness for the night Ahead.
But fear is not the only thing the knowing Bringeth. There comes, also, the slow strange flowing Of a peculiar conviction. It is the conviction Of one who has been given, by God’s affliction Or God’s blessing (hard to say which), a specific Task that no one else in the party is as terrific- Ally equipped to perform. I am the chronicler. I am the reader of the chapter. I am the one her- Alded by the Clerk’s whispered “record, record, record.” I am the one whose discipline has been stored Exactly for this moment. No other of my companions Could have read this chapter with the needful dominions Of scholarly suspicion. Ysolde is a scout, and a brilliant one, But her tools are the hedgerow and the horse’s ear, not the dun Paleography of a fourteenth-century hand. Balthazar is a seam-watcher of grand Ability in the trades and the markets, but he could not Have seen the shift from “artefact” to “power” in this plot. Seraphine can read a courtier’s face at thirty paces, but the inward Architecture of a text is not her domain; it is, in a word, Mine. And Tobin, dear Tobin, though he may know more of these matters Than he has yet let on — and I do begin to suspect that he scatters His knowledge on purpose, for reasons of his own — Even Tobin hath not the specific scholar’s tone That can read, in one evening, the interpolative hand Of a guild-editor concealing a transfer-binding-command Beneath the bluff poetry of a seventh-chapter frame.
I am the one. For this specific task, I am the one. The flame Of my candle flickers as I write this doun, and I accept The weight of the naming. It is not pride to say I am adept. It is simple true accounting. Every soul hath a use. Mine Is this reading. I shal do it well, and I shal design To share it fully with my four companions at the earliest Fitting moment, and I shal add, with all my meekest Careful caveats, the confession that I may be wrong, That interpretation is not proof, that I have not been strong Enough in paleography these many years to have kept My edge entirely sharp — but that my fears have slept Beneath the surface of my reading since the first morning At the Guild’s High Hall, and have now waked, with warning, And I will not silence them for the sake of keeping the quiet Of our fellowship. I will not barter my scholarly riot Of conclusions for the false peace of an uninformed party. We shall be informed. We shall be, as Tobin would say, hearty With the full knowing. Then we shall decide together what to do.
O, how the fire cracketh. One of the logs doth cue A shower of small red sparks into the summer night. The sparks rise up, and dim, and die before they reach the light Of the great star-field above our hollow. I look upward. I see the constellations of this world, which are not toward The ones I knew in my other life, the life before I was pulled to Saṃsāra by whatever door Gaialilith opened in my sleeping soul. They are strange Stars, in strange configurations, and I cannot exchange Their patterns for the ones I learned as a boy. But I know Them now, these Saṃsāran stars, by the long slow Acquaintance of many camps and many nights of writing Beside many fires. I know the seven-pointed fighting Cluster that the common folk call the Crown of Lothandus, And the long slow curling tail of the Serpent that lies thus Across the eastern sky at this hour of this season. I know the faint small paired eyes of the twin reason- Giver stars beneath the Serpent’s tail. I know the faint Smudge that the scholars call the Inkwell, where no saint Ever was thought to dwell, but which the poets have long claimed Is the place where Gaialilith’s own quill was named And dipped, before she wrote the first line of the world. I look at the Inkwell tonight. I look at it long. It is unfurled Above our hollow, faint, smudged, unreadable, a thing Of mystery. And I speak to it, softly, the way one might sing To a sleeping child, under my breath, not to wake my friends, But to myself, and to the Inkwell, and to whatever tends The lampfield of the night: I say:
“Gaialilith, old mother, if thou hearest me tonight, If in thy multidimensional sight the light Of one small scholar’s camp is perceptible to thee, Hear what I must beg of thee: let me read this tree Of evidence correctly. Let me not be the fool Who cries conspiracy at the wind. But let me, if the rule Of my reading is right, be brave enough to say so Aloud, in the morning, to my four companions, though The saying will frighten them, though the saying may end Our quest, though the saying may set us at odds with the friend Of the Guild that has fed me these thirty years. Let me not Choose ease over truth. Let me not be the clerk who forgot His own warning. Let me, if needed, be the one who writes The record that tells the truth, even when the truth rewrites The name of the bearer as traitor or as outlaw. Let me keep My quill steady. Let me not let the weight of my reading sleep.”
I spake this to the Inkwell in silence. The Inkwell did not answer. The Inkwell never answers. That is not what the Inkwell can or Wishes to do. The Inkwell is, in the end, a smudge in the sky, a name The scholars have given to a faint patch of stars, and the frame Of my speaking to it was not theology but comfort. I spoke To my work. I spoke to the tradition of my craft. I invoked The long chain of scholars before me who have sat in some hollow And faced some conclusion they did not wish to speak, and swallowed Their fear, and spoken anyway. I am not alone in the chain. I am only the present link. That is enough. That is the plain Condition of the work.
I closed the tome. I set the candle doune. I snuffed its flame Against a wetted thumb, because taper-wax is dear, and the blame For a wasted taper is mine. The ember-glow of the banked fire Was sufficient, in any case, for the small further desire Of the hour. I gathered my cloak more close. I sat. I watched The sleeping shapes of my companions, bedrolls blotched In the low red light: Ysolde curled like a cat, one hand Tucked beneath her cheek. Balthazar flat on his back, a band Of snoring thick and steady, the snore of a man who has made An uneasy peace with whatever inward grief he has laid Down for the night. Tobin, on his side, one arm beneath his head, His face in repose almost boyish, the kettle beside him, bed- Ded neatly within reach. Seraphine — ah, Seraphine, Seraphine was not asleep. Seraphine was lying preen- Ed on her bedroll as though asleep, but I have sat beside Too many watching-women in my life to be denied The knowledge that her breath was the breath of a watcher, Not of a sleeper, and that her right hand was closer To her pillowed dagger-pin than to her sleeping cheek. She had been watching me write. She had not wished to speak To me. She had given me the privacy of my scholar’s work, But she had been watching. And as I looked at her, I saw her lurk- Ing gaze open, the merest fraction of an eyelid’s lift, And she met my eye across the low ember-glow, and the gift She gave me, silently, was a very small nod — not a nod Of approval, not a nod of conspiracy, but a nod of “God Be with thee, Brother; I see thou hast been working; I have Been keeping watch; sleep when thou canst, or rest, or save The knowing for the morning.” That is what the nod said. I returned the nod. She closed her eyes again. I felt instead Of alone, for the first time this evening, accompanied.
I put my tome back into its oilcloth. I laid my head Upon my small saddle-roll. I did not sleep at once. I lay And looked up at the strange stars, and the Inkwell, and the grey Smoke of our banked fire rising into the Saṃsāran night, And I felt the fear of my reading, and I felt the scholar’s light Blooming-conviction alongside the fear, the peculiar bloom Of a man who is afraid because he has understood his doom But who, in the same breath, has understood his task, and who can- Not, having understood both, imagine wishing to be any Other man than the one who has understood them. I have read Many terrible pages in my time. I have never before read One that I so suspected had been arranged for me to read By the very forces I was reading about. But such is the need, It seems, of the great weave of things. Gaialilith, perhaps, Has arranged my little life to arrive at this hollow, on the traps Of the westward road, with this tome in my pack, and this candle Just long enough, and this fire just bright enough to handle The reading-light; and my four companions just near enough, Just trustworthy enough, just capable enough of the rough Business ahead, to receive the reading in the morning And to decide, with me, what to do. Perhaps. I am not a warn- Ing-prone man. I do not like to read the hand of providence Into the small coincidences of my own convenience. But I permit the thought, tonight, to sit beside me on the ground, And to warm its hands at the fire I have banked, and I am not profound Enough to send it away.
Tomorrow I will tell them. Not tomorrow morning — tomorrow evening, When we have ridden our next stretch and made our next weaving Of camp, and the quiet has returned, and we can all sit down Together by a fresh fire, and not be overheard by any clown Of a watcher on any hedgerow. I will tell them then. I will go Slow. I will show them the stanzas. I will show them how the flow Of “artefact” becomes “power.” I will show them “quell.” I will lay Out the scholar’s case, the way one lays out an indictment’s array Of evidences. And then I will step back, and I will listen, and the four Of them will have at it, each in their own fashion — Seraphine the chore Of tactical restructuring, Balthazar the chore of “Balthazar knew It, Balthazar said it, Balthazar wants it written doune, pursue The grievance through the Guild’s complaint procedure, or better Yet, pursue it through the dark alley at midnight with the better Kind of blade” — Ysolde the chore of asking, in her plainspoken way, “But what does the power want?” — Tobin the chore of something I can Not yet predict, because Tobin’s choretide is always the one man Can least predict, Tobin being a quiet well into which one’s queries Drop a long way before returning as answers. And at the series’ End we will decide, together, what to do next. Perhaps we will Continue the quest. Perhaps we will alter the ritual. Perhaps will Abort it. Perhaps we will return to the city and confront the Guild. Perhaps we will go elsewhere. Whatever we choose, we will be bild By the full knowing, and not by the Guild’s partial telling. That Is the dignity my reading can restore to us. That is the flat Honest coin I can put into the common purse. I am not The captain of this company. I am not the blade, the scout, the knot Of wisdom at the hearth. I am the reader. I am the one who Reads the pages the rest cannot. That is my gift, and into the blue Of this strange Saṃsāran night I set it down, small and quavering, And I say: I will do it. I will speak. I will not be the waver- Ing man who kept silent because silence was easier.
My gentils, I closed my eyes. The stars continued their far queasier Turning. The fire continued its low glow. Seraphine continued her watch. And I, Aldric the chronicler, Brother Aldric of the Veil, the botch- Ed Isekai soul, pulled to Saṃsāra from some life I no longer Remember, clutching a quill that has been with me longer Than any wife or child of the life I lost, I lay there Between waking and sleep, and I felt, for the first time in the dare Of this quest, that I knew what I was for. Not merely For the recording, though the recording is the work. But clearly, And specifically, for this: for the speaking of the thing the Guild Hath hidden, at the necessary moment, in the small light-filled Circle of my own four friends, who will hear it because I speak it, And who will act upon it because they trust me to have sought it Honestly, and who will, together, make of this compromised quest Some other, better thing, whose shape I cannot yet attest Unto, but whose possibility has begun, this night, beneath these strange And patient stars, to stir. I felt the stir. I let it range Through me. I let it be my last thought as sleep at length Descended upon me. I felt my candle’s old scholarly strength Pass from my wakeful mind into the dreaming mind, the lower Workroom of the soul where the real conclusions shower Doune overnight and are ready by the morning. I said, once more, Aloud but in a whisper, to myself and to the night at the door:
“Tomorrow eventide. At the fire. I tell them all.”
And then I slept. And I dreamed, my gentils, though I shal Not recount the dream here, for dreams are for another chapter. But I will say only this, for the record: that in the dream I laughed, rap- Ped on the door of a great old library, and was admitted, and within There was a chair, and on the chair there sat a figure I had been Looking for all my life, whose face I could not see, but whose voice Said unto me, “Thou hast at last read the page aright. Rejoice.” And I did rejoice. And when I woke, in the grey morning, with the fire Gone cold, and my four companions stirring in their tired Bedrolls, and the road ahead still waiting, I did carry the rejoicing With me, the small unlikely grain of it, like a seed unvoicing Its own growth, into the day. And the day began with Tobin making Porridge in the kettle, and with Ysolde laughing at some waking Joke of Balthazar’s that was half a curse upon his bedroll’s damp- Ness, and with Seraphine rising composed and already at full-lamp Wakefulness, and with the horses tossing their heads and wanting water, And with the fyve of us beginning the ordinary business a bare daughter Or son of the road must begin each morning. And none of them Knew yet what I had read in the night. None of them knew the stem Of the conclusion I was carrying. But by that evening, beside The next fire, they would. And on the reading of those pages turned aside, The shape of the quest and of our lives to come would turn.
I am Aldric. I am the Veil. I am the pen. I keep the night-long burn. The chapter shall be read aright. The reading shall be spoken. The spoken word shall change the quest. And thus shall be token Of the truth that every scholar lives in hope of at last proving: That the work done by candle-light, alone, in hollows, among sleeping Companions, in the watchful company of strange patient stars, Doth matter. Doth alter events. Doth break some chains and mend some bars. Doth, in its small and careful way, move the hinge of the world. I believe this. I must believe it. I have just seen it furled. Sleep well, my gentils. The chronicle continues. I am still awake enough To close the page. I close it now. The morning cometh, rough And bright, in its own good time. I am ready. I am not afraid. That last is not entirely true. I am afraid. But I am made Ready, which is a greater thing than being unafraid, and is the state In which I find, at this late hour of our night, my scholarly pulse sedate. Good night. Good reading. Good onwardness of the quest that was. The quest that is. The quest that shal, tomorrow eventide, cause.
Segment 7: The Enchanted Wood’s First Welcome
Och, but I’ve been through a deal of woods in my life, reader, and I’ll tell ye that straight before I tell ye anythin’ else, because a body ought to know what sort of witness they’ve got on the stand before they start listenin’ to the testimony. I’ve ridden through the birch-wood of Innesmore when the white trunks were so thick ye couldna see ten yards in any direction and the whole forest felt like standin’ inside the ribs of some enormous white-boned creature that had lay doun and died centuries before ye were born. I’ve ridden through the great pine of the Cairn Hills, where the needle-carpet swallows the hoofbeats and the silence is so complete that your own breath sounds like a trespass. I’ve ridden through the old mixed wood below Lochshield, where every kind of tree grows up alongside every other kind the way good neighbors will do, and the light comes doun in patches through seven different shapes of leaf. I’ve ridden through the black firs of the north, and the grey alders of the river-country, and the blighted oak-stretch between Morrensbridge and the sea where a body doesna sing aloud, because what lives there doesna care for singin’. I ken woods, reader. I ken them the way a sailor kens water. And I’ll tell ye true: I had never, in thirty-odd years of ridin’, entered a wood like the one that began at midday on the fourth day out from the crossroads inn.
We had left the Four Winds at first light, and we had ridden a quiet morning — quiet because Aldric had gathered us in the stableyard before we mounted and had told us, low and steady, that he would have somethin’ to share with the company that evenin’ at the fire, somethin’ he had worked oot wi’ his tome by candle the night before, and that he wanted us all fresh for the hearin’ of it. He hadna said more than that. He hadna needed to. A man like Brother Aldric doesna ask a party to keep its peace through a day’s ride for a trivial reason, and each of us had, I think, known somethin’ considerable was comin’, and each of us had, in our own way, spent the mornin’s ride composin’ ourselves for the receivin’ of it.
Seraphine rode tight and alert at the back, still nursin’ whatever slow cold counsel she had taken from the masquerade-inn the night before. Balthazar mutterin’ up front-of-the-middle, an unusual forward post for him, which told me he had taken Aldric’s warnin’ and positioned himself where his sailor’s ear could best catch any sudden crack of twig from the hedgerows. Tobin ambled in his usual place, and Tobin’s face, I noticed with a wee turn of the heart, was a touch more still than it had been the previous mornings, a touch less ready to crease into its grandfatherly smile at any passin’ sheep. Aldric himself was in the middle of the column, and Aldric’s face had the particular composure of a man who had spent a long night puttin’ his thoughts in order and who was now carryin’ those thoughts carefully through the world the way a lad carries a full bowl of broth across an uneven courtyard.
I rode ahead, as always, but I rode slower, reader. I kept Muirne to a walk for most of the mornin’, because I was feelin’ somethin’ in the road that I wanted the party to meet on its own terms rather than at a runnin’ pace. The road had begun to change.
It had begun to change about half an hour after we’d crossed the wee stone bridge over the Greenwater, which is the last named stream on any map of this country and which, according to the map Aldric kept folded in his innermost pocket, marked the practical end of settled land and the beginning of the unmapped approach to the enchanted forest. The change wasna somethin’ ye could put your finger on right away. It was a graduallin’. The hedgerows, which had been so diligent for miles, thinned and thinned, and the stone walls between the fields lost their caps and let their middle courses tumble, and the fields themselves grew wild with bramble and wi’ some flowerin’ weed that had a wee yellow head I’d never seen in my home country and whose name none of us knew. The road narrowed from a proper cart-track to a single-width way. The ruts softened. The dust of passage stopped bein’ dust and started bein’ the loose leaf-mold of ground that hadna been packed doun by many hooves in a long while.
And the birds.
I want to speak of the birds, reader, because the birds were the first honest warnin’, and I should have listened harder when I first heard them, or rather when I first heard them doin’ the thing they started doin’. Ye must understand: I’ve been ridin’ under birdsong all my life, and birdsong is not one sound to me, it’s a language, a plain spoken country language that tells ye every minute what’s happenin’ for a mile around ye if ye ken how to read it. A wren’s chitter-chitter in a hedge tells ye somethin’ small has stirred nearby. A blackbird’s loud alarm tells ye somethin’ larger has stirred. A wheatear’s wee pink tells ye it’s content and has claimed its territory. A buzzard’s far mew tells ye the sky is clear. A lark rising from the meadow tells ye the meadow is at peace. A crow assembly, wheelin’ and callin’ in a mob, tells ye somethin’ is dyin’ or has died. A cuckoo in spring tells ye the season has turned.
Now, all mornin’ as we rode toward the wood, the birdsong had been ordinary country birdsong — chaffinches and wrens and blackbirds and the rasp of a distant jay and the high shrill of a buzzard turnin’ on a thermal three fields off. Ordinary. Comfortable. The sort of birdsong a body doesna remark on because it is the healthy pulse of a healthy country. I had been singin’ back to them now and then, the way I do, pickin’ out a wee trill here and there that matched a blackbird’s phrase and sendin’ it back to him in the spirit of neighborly conversation, and the blackbirds had been answerin’ me, and all was as it should be.
And then, perhaps two miles before the wood proper, the birdsong stopped.
I mean it stopped, reader. Not faded. Not changed. Stopped. We rode into a silence of the kind ye get when a great shadow passes over the land, except there was no shadow, and the silence did not lift after a minute, and the silence did not lift after five, and as I watched the hedge-edges and listened with the whole of my scout-ear, I realized the silence wasna a shadow-silence at all. It was a held silence. The birds had not fled. The birds were still there. I could see, if I looked careful, a wren in the hawthorn a dozen yards off, sittin’ on a branch with her wee head cocked to one side. She was listenin’. She was not singin’. She was not movin’. She was waitin’. And every bird I could pick out was doin’ the same. They were waitin’.
For what, I didna yet ken. I eased Muirne back and I let the party close up around me, and we all felt it at the same moment — even Aldric, who has the ears of a scholar rather than a scout, lifted his head from his composin’ and looked about him with the widening eyes of a man who has noticed that somethin’ is absent which should be present. Tobin caught my eye and inclined his head the smallest fraction, which was his way of sayin’ aye, lass, I ken, keep goin’. Seraphine’s hand had drifted, not to her dagger, but to the place beneath her cloak where her dagger-pin lay, which was enough. Balthazar muttered, “Balthazar doesn’t like birds that don’t sing. Balthazar doesn’t like birds that sing, either, most days, but at least the singin’ ones are doin’ their job.”
We rode on. Muirne was skittery under me now, her ears in their full flickerin’ sweep, her nostrils workin’, her step shorter than usual, the wee nervous short step a horse takes when the horse is askin’ the rider’s permission to stop and the rider is not yet givin’ it. I gave Muirne my leg, soft, and I told her quiet, “Steady, lass, steady, we’re goin’ in,” and she gave me her trust, because trust is what she had to give, and I gave her mine, because trust is what I had to give back, and the two trusts together were just enough to keep her walkin’ forward through the held-silence country.
The first trees of the wood, reader, came upon us the way the first waves of a changin’ tide come upon a shore — a few at first, scattered ahead of the main body, then more, then thicker, and then, without any announcement, we were amongst them, and the road was not a road but a green tunnel, and the sky above was not a sky but a woven ceilin’ of interlaced branches, and the light was not the ordinary gold-white light of a summer afternoon but a green light, an underwater light, a cathedral light of the kind a body only sees inside the naves of the old stone kirks where the windows are paned in thick green glass.
I want to tell ye about the green, reader. I want to tell ye about it slow, because the green was the first true wonder of the wood, and I want to give it its due.
The green was not one green. That’s the first thing. An ordinary wood gives ye maybe three or four greens — the dark green of the conifer needles, the brighter green of the deciduous leaves, the yellow-green of young growth, the blue-green of moss. An ordinary wood gives ye greens ye can count. This wood gave ye a green of which I could not find the bottom. It was layered. I looked up into the canopy and I saw, in descending plates of brightness, first the outermost leaves lit from behind by whatever sun was still findin’ its way doun, and those were a translucent yellow-green like a drinkin’ glass of new apple wine held up to a candle; and then beneath those, a layer of leaves half-shadowed, which were the green of a mallard’s wing-flash; and beneath those, another layer in fuller shadow, which were the green of the sea at the edge of a cliff; and beneath those, another layer, deeper still, which were the green of a moss that has grown for a century on the north face of an old stone; and beneath those, the air itself between the layers, which had taken on the green of all of the leaves at once, so that the very emptiness between the trunks was a soft dim green in which small motes of pollen drifted slowly doune, and my breath, as I breathed it out, fogged pale green for the smallest fraction of a second before it dissolved.
Muirne breathed green. I breathed green. The others came into the tunnel behind me one by one and each of them breathed green, and I watched their faces as the wood took them, each in its own way. Tobin rode into the green and his whole face lit up. He looked, for a moment, younger than I had yet seen him look — not boyish, not ridiculously rejuvenated, but as if a weight of years had briefly settled lower in his body, leaving his face free for a different expression. He said, soft, “Oh. Oh, now. Hello.” And he said it the way ye say hello to an old friend ye had not known ye were about to encounter. I did not ask him what he meant. I filed it away.
Aldric rode into the green and his hand went to his tome before he even noticed it had gone. He began composin’ again almost at once, his lips workin’ silently, and I ken from watchin’ him these past days that he composes rhymed verse when he is overwhelmed in the good direction, and blank prose when he is overwhelmed in the bad one. He was composin’ rhymes. So the wood was moving him rightly, in the direction of awe.
Balthazar rode into the green and his mutterin’ stopped. I’m no’ lyin’ to ye. The man who had been mutterin’ steady since Haverfold went dead silent for a full thirty seconds, which for Balthazar is the equivalent of another man weepin’, and when the mutterin’ resumed it was in a different cadence, slower, more rhythmic, and I caught the phrase, “Balthazar has been in a cathedral before. Balthazar was raised in a cathedral. Balthazar remembers.” I didna ken what he meant, but he said it with a kind of sudden naked homesickness that made me want to ride back and touch his shoulder and I did not, because Balthazar would no more receive a comfortin’ touch in such a moment than he would accept charity from a guildmaster, but I marked that I would speak gentler to him that evenin’ at the fire.
Seraphine rode into the green and, reader, I saw Seraphine smile. I saw her smile in a way I had not yet seen her smile in all the days of our acquaintance. It was not the cordial court-smile she had used at the Four Winds. It was not the pleased private smile I had glimpsed once or twice when somethin’ in our company had met her private standards. It was a smaller, stranger, more childlike smile, a smile of recognition or perhaps of homecomin’, though I could not imagine what in a strange enchanted wood would feel like home to Seraphine. But she smiled, and her shoulders, which had been carryin’ themselves a span higher than natural since the masquerade-inn, came doun a quarter of an inch, and she rode into the green the way a woman rides into a room where she knows she will be safe for an hour.
And I — I rode into the green and I felt my chest do the thing my chest does when I have come upon somethin’ I did not ken I had been lookin’ for all my life. My throat tightened. My eyes stung a wee bit, though no proper tear fell. My hand on Muirne’s rein went still. I wanted to dismount. I wanted to walk. I wanted to lay my face against the bark of the nearest tree, which was a tree I did not ken the species of, a tree with silvery bark and wide dark leaves shaped like the palms of small hands, and I wanted to whisper somethin’ into its bark that I did not yet ken the words of. I did not dismount. I did not whisper. I rode on. But I marked the wantin’, and I did not deny it, because a scout who denies her first wantin’ in a strange wood is a scout who will not hear her second wantin’, which might be the one that saves her life.
Now here is where I have to tell ye about the birds, reader, because I had said the birds stopped, and they had, but I hadna yet told ye what the birds did next.
About fifty yards into the green tunnel, as the road became scarcely a path and the path began to wind softly between the great silver trunks, I heard a bird.
It was not the wren. It was not the blackbird. It was not any bird I had ever heard in my life, though my ear for birdsong is as fine as my father’s was, and he could name twenty-three species by call alone. This bird had a voice like a silver wire being drawn slowly through a wooden reed, and the phrase it sang was not a phrase any bird of my knowing would make. Birds sing in repeatable patterns. A bird’s phrase is three or five or seven notes in a pattern the bird has owned since hatching, and the bird repeats the pattern with minor variations all its life, and that is how ye learn the bird — by the pattern. This bird’s phrase was not a pattern. It was a sentence. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. It rose for three notes, paused, descended for five, paused longer, and finished with two held tones a fifth apart. And when it was done, it did not repeat. It waited.
It was waitin’ for an answer.
I ken, reader. I ken how that sounds. I ken ye might be thinkin’ I was tired and my imagination was gallopin’. But I ken what a bird waitin’ for an answer sounds like — I have heard male blackbirds do it a thousand times, answerin’ and re-answerin’ other males across a hedge-line — and this bird, this silver-wire bird, was waitin’ for an answer, and it was waitin’ for the answer from me, because I was the one in the wood who had, all mornin’, been offerin’ the blackbirds their phrases back.
I didna think about it long. I put my fingers to my lips and I whistled back the phrase I had just heard. I whistled it clear. I have a good whistle, reader. My da taught me to whistle when I was five years old, and he said to me, “Ysolde, lass, a scout who cannae whistle is a scout who has half the tools she needs. Learn this.” And I had learned it. I whistled the silver-wire bird’s phrase back to it — three rising, pause, five descending, longer pause, two held a fifth apart — and I did not change a note of it, because ye do not change a stranger’s words the first time ye repeat them.
There was a silence.
And then, reader — and then the silver-wire bird sang back. But it did not sing back my repeated phrase. It sang back a new phrase, built on the bones of the first but extended, with three additional notes at the end, which dropped below the starting pitch and curled back up to a half-resolution, the way a question curls upward at its end. It was askin’ me somethin’. I did not ken the language. I did not ken the meaning. But I kent the grammar. It had said a thing. I had said the thing back. It had said a longer thing that was a question. I was bein’ invited into a conversation, and I had to decide whether to continue.
Now, reader, I will tell ye true, every scout’s instinct in me said: do not continue. Do not engage with a strange voice in a strange wood when ye do not ken its intentions. Back away from the conversation. Ride on. Put the wood’s strangeness behind ye or at least behind the rest of the party, and consult with the party at the evenin’ fire before ye answer further.
But there was another instinct, reader, older than the scout’s instinct, and that was the instinct of my grandmother, who used to tell me when I was a wee girl that the old woods have voices, and that when an old wood’s voice speaks to ye by name, ye answer, because not to answer is the greater rudeness, and the woods remember rudeness longer than they remember any other quality in their visitors. The silver-wire bird had not called me by name, exactly, but it had called me by the form of my whistle, which for a bird-language is the same thing, and I found I could not refuse the conversation without my grandmother’s ghost givin’ me a scoldin’ from whatever corner of the multiverse she was scoldin’ from.
I whistled back. I thought carefully, and I composed. I whistled the silver-wire bird’s second phrase in its entirety, and then I added to it a small coda of my own makin’, a wee three-note tail that means, in my own private bird-dialect with the blackbirds of home, “I am listenin’, go on.” I am no’ sayin’ the silver-wire bird would understand the coda — I am sayin’ it was the only honest coda I had in me, and a scout whistles honest or not at all.
And the wood, reader, the wood answered.
Not just the silver-wire bird. The wood. From three directions, simultaneously, at different pitches, three other voices took up phrases — one high and thin, one middle and piping, one low and almost a hoot — and they wove themselves into and around the silver-wire bird’s next phrase, and for perhaps eight seconds there was a short passage of music in the green tunnel that was not a bird’s call and was not a human song and was somethin’ in between, a music that had four parts, of which I was bein’ invited to be the fifth, and I felt — I will tell ye honest, reader, I felt what I felt, and ye may judge — I felt welcomed.
I have felt welcomed in my life in many ways. I have been welcomed into country taverns by red-cheeked wives and into city halls by guild officials and into my gran’s kitchen by the smell of her bread. I have been welcomed at fires by travelers who had nothin’ to share and shared it anyway. I had never, before the middle of that afternoon in the enchanted wood, been welcomed by a place. A place had never before opened itself to me and said, in a language I half-understood, we ken who ye are, lass, we were expectin’ somebody of thy quality, ride in, ride in, ride careful, but ride in.
I wiped my eye with the back of my glove, and I did not let the others see me do it. I let Muirne walk on. I did not whistle the fifth part. I let the four-part music run its own course, because I did not yet ken the music well enough to add a voice to it without disturbin’ it, and the first rule of a scout who has been welcomed by a strange place is to honor the welcome by not overreachin’ it. I listened. The music ran perhaps another dozen seconds and then it dispersed — each voice droppin’ out one by one — and the green tunnel settled back into its cathedral-quiet, and I rode on, and I felt my heart poundin’ against my ribs the way it pounds when somethin’ tremendous and a wee bit terrifyin’ has happened and ye have managed not to disgrace yourself durin’ the happenin’ of it.
And then, reader, here is where the creepin’ wariness comes in, because I am bein’ honest with ye and I will not pretend the welcome was all one flavor. Even as the four voices dispersed, I understood somethin’ that I had no’ understood in the first flush of the welcomin’. I understood that the welcome had been specific. The wood had welcomed me. I had felt it welcome me personally, by my whistle-signature. It had no’ welcomed the party. It had no’ welcomed Muirne. It had no’ welcomed Tobin or Aldric or Balthazar or Seraphine or any of the horses. The welcome had been precisely addressed to the lass with the good whistle at the front of the column, and it had been carefully and pointedly silent about the other five souls and four horses behind her.
Which meant, reader, that the wood could distinguish between us. Which meant the wood was payin’ individual attention. Which meant the wood was not a wood in the ordinary sense but somethin’ more considerable, somethin’ that had a will and a discrimination and a set of preferences, and somethin’ that had just declared its preference for me over and above my four companions.
This is no’ a comfortable thing to ken about a place ye are ridin’ into. It is no’ a comfortable thing to be the favored visitor in a hall where your companions are un-favored. It raises a whole set of questions a body does not want to ask in the middle of an afternoon’s ride. Does the wood mean to welcome me and harm them? Does the wood mean to welcome me and merely ignore them? Does the wood mean to welcome me as a test, to see whether I can be split off from the party? Does the wood have any such intentions at all, or is it simply respondin’ to the stimulus it has received, the way a dog responds to a whistle, and will it respond equally to any of the others if they give it an appropriate stimulus?
I did not ken. I could no’ ken, ridin’ there under the green cathedral, with four dear souls at my back and a strange silver-wire bird somewhere in the upper layers, silent now, listenin’ for my next note. I could only do what a good scout does when a situation has grown more complicated than she can resolve by herself. I could carry the information. I could ride careful. I could tell the others at the evenin’ fire.
And yet even as I made that plain sensible resolution, I felt the wood’s attention settle on me like a warm cloak across my shoulders, and I felt it was a friendly attention, and I felt — and I am tellin’ ye this because I have promised to tell ye true, reader — I felt a wee selfish wish, buried beneath the sensible scout’s resolution, that the attention would stay on me and not transfer itself to the others. I wanted the wood to like me best. It is an ugly thing to confess, and I confess it anyway. I wanted to be the wood’s chosen, and I wanted it the way a middle child wants to be the parent’s chosen, and I ken the wantin’ as the old bad wantin’ that every human creature carries around in some corner of them whether they admit it or not, and I did not act on the wantin’, but I noted its presence, and I carried it on with me, and I resolved to tell the fire about it, too, because a party that does not hear its members’ uglier wantings along with their brighter ones is a party that will be split by those wantings the first time stress is applied. I would be honest at the fire. I would.
We rode on. The wood deepened. The path became fainter. The green of the air was now so thick that the dust motes I had seen driftin’ earlier were visible as wee pale flecks against the emerald gloom, and Aldric, I heard, was murmurin’ to himself in his rhymed-overwhelmed voice, composing somethin’ elaborate about cathedrals and naves, and Tobin’s kettle was swingin’ gentle against his back in a rhythm that had somehow matched itself to the wood’s own rhythm, which was a slow long rhythm of a kind I cannae quite describe, but ye ken the rhythm a body feels when ye stand on a lang pier and feel the deep swell of a harbor beneath ye — that rhythm, that beneath-rhythm, was in the wood, and Tobin’s kettle had matched it, and Tobin, I think, had matched it too.
Balthazar’s horse began to resist. The brown mare, Bramble, had been enduring the wood with a sailor-horse’s gloomy stoicism up until perhaps the third hundred yards in, and then she had stopped, flat stopped, and had put her ears back and had blown through her nostrils, and Balthazar had not been able to persuade her to move. He dismounted. I watched him dismount with the care of a man who is not a horseman handlin’ a horse he respects more than he admits, and I watched him put his hand on Bramble’s neck and speak to her in a low continuous mutter that I could not quite catch from my position at the head of the column, and I watched Bramble’s ears come slowly forward again as she listened to Balthazar, and I watched her take a cautious step, and another, and follow him on foot into the deeper green. Balthazar, it seemed, could walk a horse through the enchanted wood if he could not ride one through it. I resolved to watch Bramble for the rest of the day, because whatever Bramble was sensin’ was real and was worth trackin’.
Muirne, bless her, did not resist. Muirne had apparently made her own arrangement with the wood’s attention, or perhaps she was trustin’ me to ride her through it, or perhaps — and this is the explanation I secretly preferred — Muirne had been welcomed by the wood along with me, as the horse of the favored visitor, in which case Muirne and I were in the wood’s goodwill together, which was a slightly less lonely place to be than I had feared a moment earlier. I reached doun and I scratched Muirne behind her left ear, which is where she likes to be scratched when she is doin’ a hard thing bravely, and I said to her soft, “Thank ye, lass, thank ye, we’re doin’ fine,” and Muirne flicked her ear approvingly and walked on.
The silver-wire bird sang one more time, about a quarter-mile further into the green. It sang a single phrase this time, short and sweet, and I took it to be a sort of “ye are still with us, good,” a continuation-signal, not a summons. I whistled back the same short phrase, exactly, with no coda and no embellishment, which was the equivalent of “aye, still here, thank ye, carry on,” and the silver-wire bird did not reply, which I took as the equivalent of good, go on. A body learns the manners of a language fast when the language is pitched for her native ear, and the silver-wire bird’s language was pitched, somehow, for mine.
And then, about an hour into the wood, we came upon the first clear sign that this place was more than just a wood in the common meaning. We came upon a shrine.
I’ll describe it to ye, reader, because it was a bonnie and terrible thing, and I want ye to see it plain.
The path widened, a little, into a wee circular clearing perhaps fifteen yards across, open to the sky, and the sky through the gap was the first proper blue I had seen in over an hour, and the sun came down through the gap in a single broad shaft that lit the circle like a stage. In the middle of the circle stood a standing stone, about twice the height of a man, carved with runes or glyphs of a kind I had never seen in any region I had ridden, though I’ve seen a deal of old stones in my time. The glyphs were neither letters nor pictures exactly, but somethin’ between — shapes that looked as if they might once have been readable but had been weathered and softened and half-reclaimed by the wood, so that moss grew in the grooves and lichen patched the flat faces and ye could only read about half of the inscriptions at any one angle, which meant ye had to walk around the stone to piece it together, and even then ye would not piece it all.
Around the base of the stone, in a rough ring about two yards out from the stone itself, small offerings had been placed. Not recent offerings. Old ones. A cracked wooden cup. A knot of tarnished silver wire shaped like a coiled snake. A bundle of dried flowers that had been bound together with red thread and had aged into a brittle brown ghost of themselves. A wee stone carved into the shape of an eye, with the pupil inlaid in a blue paste that had faded almost to grey. A horseshoe, real iron, red with rust. A folded piece of vellum, which I did not approach, because opening it would have been disrespectful — the vellum had been folded by somebody’s hand in somebody’s particular trouble, and it was not for me to unfold.
These offerings had been placed over a long, long stretch of time. I could tell by the weathering on them. The horseshoe, I would have put at maybe two hundred years. The cracked cup, longer. The silver wire, longer still. The stone eye — I didna ken, but older than any of the others. Which meant this shrine had been visited steadily for centuries by people who knew it existed and who knew it deserved an offering. Which meant this wood, for all its appearance of being untouched wild land at the end of settled country, was in fact a well-traveled and well-honored place among those who traveled it.
I halted Muirne at the edge of the clearing. I did not ride into the clearing. Ye do not ride into a clearin’ that has a shrine in its middle, reader. Ye dismount, and ye enter slow, and ye keep your hat off if ye are wearin’ a hat, and ye do not speak loud, and ye do not take anythin’ from the ring of offerings no matter how bonnie it is, and ye leave somethin’ of your own if ye have anythin’ to leave that the shrine would want.
The others came up behind me and halted. Nobody had to be told the manners. Tobin dismounted first, took off his cap, and stood with his head slightly bowed. Aldric dismounted and stood with his tome pressed to his chest. Balthazar, still leadin’ Bramble, came alongside and did a thing I had not expected him to do, which was to remove his hat — a wide-brimmed weathered thing that he wore against sun and rain — and to hold it in both hands against his stomach in a posture of such specific reverence that I knew, without bein’ told, that he had performed this exact posture before in exactly this exact kind of place, and that the cathedral-memory he had muttered about on first ridin’ into the green had been an honest memory, and that Balthazar Vex, whatever else he was, was a man raised in the knowledge of how to stand at a shrine. Seraphine dismounted last, and she did somethin’ even more particular — she unpinned her dagger-pin from her chest and she held it in her open right palm, and she bowed her head over it briefly, and then she re-pinned it, and the whole gesture took perhaps four seconds, and it was the gesture of a woman offerin’ her concealed weapon to the spirit of the place in token of her peaceful intent, and it was a gesture from a school of courtly courtesy so old that I did not ken where she had learned it. I filed that question away with all the other questions I had been fillin’ about Seraphine.
I stepped into the clearing first, because I was the scout and the scout enters first, and I walked slow to the base of the stone, and I stood beside it and looked up at the glyphs, and I felt — this is the truth, reader, and I will no’ soften it — I felt the whole wood’s attention gather and settle on me, not with the friendly warmth of the earlier welcome, but with somethin’ graver, somethin’ assessin’, somethin’ closer to a question than a welcome. The wood was askin’ me somethin’ at the stone. I did not ken what it was askin’. I did what my gran had taught me to do at an old stone ye do not ken the language of: I laid my gloved palm flat against the cool lichened surface, and I closed my eyes, and I said, in the quietest whisper I could manage without my voice disappearin’ altogether:
“I am Ysolde Kerrigan, daughter of Donal Kerrigan of the Verdant Keep, on a quest westward. I bear no ill toward this wood nor toward this stone nor toward the old ones who set the stone here. I pass through as a guest. I ask leave to pass through with my four companions and our four horses. We will take nothin’ from this place. We will leave what we can.”
That was all I said. I opened my eyes. I took my palm off the stone. I stepped back. I did not ken whether I had been heard. Ye never ken, with old stones. Ye only ken that ye spoke honest.
And then I took from my saddlebag a small bright copper coin — a Haverfold coin, struck in the Haverfold mint, with the Haverfold saltmark on its face — and I laid it careful on the ground at the base of the stone, in the ring of offerings, and I stepped back again, and I bowed my head.
One by one, the others came forward. Tobin laid down a small sprig of rosemary he had kept in his coat pocket for days, and which he must have been carryin’ for exactly this kind of purpose. Aldric laid down a pinch of ink powder from a twist of paper, which I took to be a scholar’s offering of the medium of his craft. Balthazar laid down — and here I was surprised — Balthazar laid down a small bronze button, tarnished green with age, and he laid it with his hat in his two hands and his lips movin’ silent, and I did not ask what the button was from nor where he had carried it, because his face when he laid it doun was too private to be asked about. Seraphine laid down a single black silk ribbon, of the kind that had tied the parcel she had carried out of Haverfold, and she laid it folded twice, and she laid it with the precise courtly care of a woman who has laid down many ribbons in many places over the course of a life I did not yet ken the shape of.
Five of us. Five offerings. Five small declarations of passage. The wood received them in silence. The sun-shaft on the clearing stayed broad and blue. The silver-wire bird did not sing. No bird sang. The quiet of the shrine was a different quiet than the quiet of the wood on the path — it was a listening quiet, not a held one — and it lasted perhaps half a minute after the last offering was laid, and then, reader, as clear as anythin’ I have ever heard in my life, I heard, from somewhere in the canopy above us, a single slow deep note, a tone, a hum, more like the tone of a well-tuned low string on a great cello than the call of any creature, and it lasted perhaps four seconds, and it faded, and when it faded, the wood around us began, softly, to resume its ordinary life. A leaf moved. A small wren-like thing cheeped far off in the green. The air stirred. The sun-shaft on the clearing shifted a degree as the afternoon advanced.
We had been acknowledged. That is the only word I have for it. We had presented ourselves, and we had been acknowledged.
I did not ken whether the acknowledgment was a permission or a consent or a mere registration of our passage, the way a gatekeeper might register a traveler’s name without forming any further opinion about the traveler’s business. But we had been noticed, and we had done the thing right, and whatever was in the wood that had the capacity to hold a low note for four seconds had not objected to us, and that was more than we could reasonably have hoped for, and I was grateful, and I felt my chest release a wee breath I had not ken’d I was holdin’.
We mounted up again — Balthazar waited a further few paces before remountin’, because Bramble was still not havin’ it, and I watched Balthazar lead her on for another half-furlong before she finally let him climb on her back, and when she did, I watched Balthazar touch her neck in a way that was almost tender, and I made another silent note that Balthazar Vex contained more tender than he would ever admit in public. We rode on. The wood continued its green cathedral. The path continued its narrow winding. The silver-wire bird sang one more time, much further off now, a farewell phrase that descended gently through the pitches and ended on a low held note a fifth below where it had started, and I whistled back a short two-note farewell of my own without thinkin’ too hard about it, and the silver-wire bird did not reply, because farewells, between well-met strangers, do not require replies.
We rode perhaps another two hours through the green before the light began to soften toward evening, and Tobin, always the one with the good nose for a campsite, drew up alongside me and said quiet, “There’s a good hollow about a quarter-mile ahead of us, lass. I can smell the water. We’d do well to camp there.” And I did not question him — Tobin’s nose for campsites had not yet failed us once — and we rode the quarter-mile, and we came indeed upon a hollow, a small cup-shaped depression in the wood-floor, with a wee trickle of a stream runnin’ through it and a cleared space at its center where someone, at some time, had laid the first stones of a fire-ring. The stones of the fire-ring were old. They had been laid long ago. The wood had not reclaimed them, which meant the wood permitted them to stay, which meant this hollow was understood by the wood to be a camping-place for travelers, and we were understood by the wood to be travelers for whom a camping-place was appropriate, and every one of these small ordinary permissions felt, in the soft greenin’ of the evening, like an enormous grace.
We set up camp slow and careful. Tobin built the fire. Aldric saw to the horses with me, because we had learned over the past evenings that Aldric, for all his scholar’s distance, had hands that were gentle on a tired horse, and the horses liked him for it. Balthazar set about the small practical tasks of camp — the oilcloth, the waterskins, the small checks of gear — with the muttered efficiency that was his honest way of contributin’. Seraphine, as she did every evening, walked the perimeter of our camp in a slow wide circle, markin’ the lines of sight and the likely approach-paths, and she did this with her dagger-pin unpinned and held lightly in her right hand, as was her habit, and she returned to the fire satisfied.
And when the fire was kindled, and the kettle was steamin’, and the horses were picketed and quiet, and the five of us were settled in our usual evening-log arrangement around the hearth, and Tobin had poured the first round of his fierce hot kettle-tea into the five tin cups we carried, I looked across the fire at Aldric, and Aldric looked back at me, and we each gave the other a small nod, and I understood without askin’ that Aldric’s promised chapter-hearing had arrived — and that I, too, had a report to make to the fire before the night was through, about the wood’s welcome and the wood’s favor and the wood’s particular attention to the lass at the head of the column. I would make my report after Aldric made his. I would not steal the moment from him. He had been carryin’ his findin’ through the long hours of the day and the longer hours of the previous night, and it was his turn to speak first.
I took a long pull of Tobin’s tea. The tea was scaldin’ and smokey and sweetened with a wee pinch of honey from Tobin’s private store, and it tasted like home, which was a strange thing to taste in an enchanted wood a hundred leagues from anywhere I had ever lived, but there it was. Over the rim of the cup I looked up through the gap in the canopy above our hollow, and the first stars were beginning to come out — strange Saṃsāran stars, unfamiliar in their patterns, but stars nonetheless — and the great faint smudge that Aldric had once told me the scholars called the Inkwell was risin’ slow above the eastern edge of our clearing, and the green of the wood around us had darkened into a blackish-green nearer to the color of a deep loch at dusk.
I rubbed my thumb over the coin in my pocket of the heart. The coin from the green mornin’ and the watched mile. It had been warm in my pocket all day, and it was warmer now, and I added to it, in the silent ritual I kept with myself, the coin of this afternoon — the coin of the wood’s welcome and the wood’s attention and the wood’s acknowledgment at the shrine and the wood’s low held note like a cello-string across the canopy — and I put the new coin in the pocket alongside the old, and I found, reader, that the two coins warmed each other, the way two stones from a hearth will keep each other’s heat longer than either would alone, and I thought: these are rare coins. These are coins I will be rubbin’ for the rest of my life.
The fire popped. Aldric set doun his tea-cup and drew oot his tome, and he opened it to a marked page, and he cleared his throat the small scholarly way he does when he is about to speak at length, and the four of us turned our faces toward him and settled in to listen.
But that, reader, is his chapter to tell, and I will not steal his tellin’. I will only say that as Aldric began, and as the fire crackled, and as the wood around us kept its green cathedral silence, I felt — I felt, reader, plain and unashamed — that I was exactly where I was meant to be, with exactly the four souls I was meant to be with, in a wood that had welcomed me and had acknowledged us, at the beginning of the most considerable tellin’ of my whole life, and that whatever came next, whether grief or triumph or both as is the usual way, I would be carrying the coins of this day in the pocket of my heart through every step of it, and no spectral guardian nor rival quester nor false guild writ could ever reach in and take the coins out.
The wood around us held its green breath. Aldric began to speak. I listened. And the enchanted wood, reader, listened with me.
Segment 8: A Philosophical Interlude on the Nature of Trees
Call me, still, Balthazar. Call me that and grant me, reader, one further indulgence at the outset of this telling, which is that you allow me the latitude of a man who has spent his life upon the water and is now being asked, by the slow unfolding of circumstances he did not invite and cannot refuse, to ride horseback through a wood that does not behave as woods are meant to behave. I tell you that I am ill-suited to this office. I have told my companions as much, in the muttered and indirect fashion that is the only fashion in which I find myself capable of telling anyone anything, and my companions have nodded, and they have gone on leading me further into the green, and I have gone on following them, because there is no other course available to a man who has sworn his provisional oath to a party at a tavern over a bowl of stew, and because, I will admit and I will not pretend otherwise, I have discovered that I would rather follow these four particular souls into a green horror than ride back alone into any of the gold horrors to which my solitary life has heretofore acquainted me. This is, I suppose, the first and smallest confession of this segment. I will make larger ones. Bear with me.
We had passed the shrine in the sun-shafted clearing some hours before, and we had made our camp at the hollow with the old fire-ring, and we had heard Brother Aldric’s long and careful and deeply frightening chapter-reading at the fire, in which that excellent scholar had laid out, stanza by stanza, word by carefully weighed word, his conviction that the seventh chapter of the Chronicle of the Ancients had been tampered with by a later editor for the purpose of directing ignorant questers such as ourselves to perform a ritual whose true nature was not the recovery of an artifact but the rebinding and possible transfer of a power whose original custodians had been neither consulted nor informed. We had heard him out in full. We had listened the way a crew listens to a captain who has calmly announced that the cargo is contraband and the port authorities know it. We had each, in our own fashion, received the news, and we had each, in our own fashion, accepted it, and we had agreed, by the slow unspoken agreement of five people who have chosen to remain at the same fire after a hard truth, that we would continue forward for now, with altered intentions and sharpened eyes, and that we would not make any final decision about the ritual until we were nearer the Vale and had more information. This resolution had been reached somewhere around the second hour past midnight, and we had slept what little we were able to sleep, and we had risen in the greenish dawn of the enchanted wood’s second morning, and we had saddled up, and we had ridden on.
It is of the riding on that I now propose to speak. Specifically, I propose to speak of the wood through which we rode that second day, and of what it stirred in me, the sailor, the twice-drowned landsman, who had never before in his life been made to spend two consecutive days beneath a canopy he could not see above. For there is, reader, a particular disturbance in the soul of a sailor when he is placed beneath a canopy he cannot see above, and it is the disturbance I wish now to record, because it has taken hold of me thoroughly, and because recording it seems to be the only means I have of reducing it from a terror to a companionable melancholy.
Consider, first, the sailor’s relation to the sky. A man who has spent his life upon the deep learns, by necessity and by long apprenticeship, to read the sky the way a scholar reads a book. The position of the sun tells him the hour; the shape of the clouds tells him the weather of the next six hours and sometimes of the next six days; the color of the sunset tells him the quality of the morning to come; the movement of the clouds tells him the direction of the wind at altitudes he will never touch; the appearance of a single high wisp at an unseasonable elevation tells him, if he has the wit to read it, that a system is forming three hundred miles to the west that will reach him in forty hours and will carry with it the kind of weather a prudent captain prepares for. The sailor’s sky is a living library, and the sailor reads from it constantly, without conscious effort, from the moment his eyes open in his narrow bunk to the moment he closes them again. It is his instinct. It is his inheritance. It is, I will say with some hesitation, his religion, for a religion is what one consults reflexively in moments of uncertainty, and the sailor consults the sky.
Now take that sailor, and strip him of his sky.
That, reader, is what the enchanted wood has done to me.
I have, for the space of two days, not seen the sky. I mean that literally. I have seen, at the shrine-clearing, one shaft of blue through a gap in the canopy, for perhaps ten minutes, and that was all. I have seen, through the interwoven layers of leaves above us, a diffuse green glow that is the sun’s passage filtered through uncountable substances between the sun and my eye. I have not seen a cloud. I have not seen a star, save at our camping-hollows where the trees thinned and the sky opened a little for our fires. I have not seen the sun’s disk. I have not seen the shadow of my horse’s head moving across the ground in the way one tracks the hour from the shadow’s angle. I have not seen a single one of the hundred small astronomical sacraments by which a sailor navigates his ordinary existence.
I have been stripped of my sky. And because I have been stripped of my sky, I have discovered that I do not know what hour it is. I know what hour it is by the position of the sun through the canopy, vaguely; I know that we are past noon because the green is growing subtly deeper; I know that we are toward evening because the green is growing subtly blacker; but I do not know the hour in the precise way that a sailor needs to know the hour in order to feel himself a citizen of a navigable world. I have begun, I confess, to feel ungoverned by time. The hours have flowed one into the next without the markers that ordinarily separate them, and the effect has been, I will say it plainly, unsettling. I have not slept properly for two nights. I have not eaten properly for two days. I have caught myself, more than once, reaching for the compass in my inner pocket, not because I needed to know which direction was which — the path through the wood is clear enough, and my companions know the direction well enough — but because holding the compass in my hand and watching its needle point steadily toward the nearest body of significant water is the only act in my current life that reminds me I am a man of instruments, a man who can read a world, a man who once knew what hour it was by looking up.
But I digress. I digress, reader, because digression is the only way I know how to approach the true subject of this segment, which is not the sky but the canopy. Let me come now to the canopy.
The canopy of the enchanted wood is not a single thing. This is the discovery I have made over two days of staring upward whenever my horse did not require my attention for keeping her on the path. The canopy is a layered thing, and its layers are numerous, and they interact with one another in ways that are not mechanical but almost, I will go so far as to say, deliberate. At the highest reach of the canopy there is a layer of leaves that I never see directly, only by the quality of green-gold light they transmit downward. Below that layer there is a second layer, which I glimpse now and again through the occasional gap, and which consists of broader and darker leaves. Below that layer there is a third, which is where the branches begin to be visible to the eye, and where the structure of the wood becomes legible, and where, when one looks carefully, one begins to discern the fact that there are living creatures moving up there — small birds, larger birds, things that may or may not be birds, the occasional flicker of something I have not succeeded in identifying. Below that layer, at the level of perhaps thirty feet above the ground, there is a fourth canopy, composed of the lower branches of the larger trees intermingled with the upper branches of the smaller trees, and this is the layer from which, yesterday, the silver-wire bird of which Ysolde has spoken addressed her conversationally. And below that fourth layer, at the level of perhaps ten feet above the ground, there is a fifth canopy, composed of saplings and shrubs and the lower dependent growth of older trees, and this is the canopy that touches us as we ride, that brushes our cloaks, that sometimes reaches down to pluck at a hat or a rein, and this is the only canopy we have anything like a clear relation to.
Five canopies, reader. Five layers of green, stacked above us, each layer concealing the one above it, each layer imposing upon our vision a set of constraints and suggestions, each layer doing its own work in the economy of the wood, and not one of them transparent to the eye of a man below. Five canopies, and above them, sky.
This is where the comparison to my native medium asserts itself, and I will not dodge it, because the comparison is the whole of my present psychic condition, and I owe it to you, reader, to set it down.
The deep sea, reader, has layers.
It has the surface layer, which is perhaps thirty fathoms thick, and which is sunlit, and in which most of what sailors think of as the sea takes place: the fish we harvest, the winds we ride, the storms we survive, the commerce of human and fish and cetacean that constitutes the ordinary business of the ocean. Below this surface layer there is a second layer, a twilight layer, perhaps two hundred fathoms thick, in which the light fails by degrees, in which the creatures that live there are adapted to the dimming, in which things begin to happen that the surface sailor never sees. Below this twilight layer there is a third layer, the midnight zone, in which no sunlight penetrates at all, in which the creatures that live there generate their own light from within themselves, in which the pressure is already such that no unprotected human body could survive for an instant. Below this midnight zone there is a fourth layer, the abyssal plain, which is an enormous level surface of mud and bone and falling matter from the layers above, and which is cold and dark and almost, but not quite, without life. And below this abyssal plain there is a fifth layer, the trenches, the deep trenches that cut into the sea floor and descend to depths at which no instrument we have made can reliably function, at which the pressure is so great that the water itself is slightly denser than it is at the surface, and in which, as every sailor knows in his bones whether he will admit it at a tavern table or not, things live that are not accounted for in any register of species, things that are older than our race is and that have no interest in our race except insofar as we occasionally fall through the midnight zone in our sunken ships and present ourselves to them in a form they may or may not find edible.
Five layers of sea, reader. Five layers of wood. And I will tell you the equivalence I have been circling for the last two paragraphs, and which has been riding beside me on Bramble’s patient brown back for the whole of this second day, and which is the reason I am in the state of melancholy fascination edged with real fear that I have promised to describe: the sailor who gazes downward from his deck at the surface of the water, and the landsman who gazes upward from his saddle at the canopy of a wood, are performing, without knowing it, the same act. They are looking at a surface beyond which they cannot see, and behind which layers of increasing strangeness exist, and from which, occasionally, the creatures of those layers emerge to acknowledge, or to consume, the visitor who has ventured into their sphere.
The wood is an inverted sea. The canopy is the waterline read backward. Those who walk below the canopy are the sailors of the inverted ocean, and they do not know this about themselves because they have been taught to think of themselves as landsmen, firmly grounded, and they take the green surface above them for a kind of ceiling rather than for what it is, which is a waterline, an interface, a boundary between the world they know and the world they do not. And above them, in the inverted deep, live creatures adapted to the green twilight, the green midnight, the green abyssal plain, the green trenches. And those creatures look down at the walkers below the canopy as the deep creatures of my own original ocean look up at the ships that pass above them: curiously, hungrily, indifferently, or not at all, according to their kind.
This is the thought that has ridden with me for the whole of this second day in the green. It is not a pleasant thought. It is not a scholarly thought. It is not the kind of thought a man of my profession should be having at all, because my profession is to buy waterskins and check their seams and ride from one task to the next without undue reflection. But I have had the thought, and having had it I cannot unthink it, and having failed to unthink it I have begun, slowly, over the long hours of the day’s ride, to explore its corners, and the corners have opened into rooms, and the rooms have opened into deeper rooms, and I am now, I fear, in the kind of metaphysical structure from which it is difficult to find one’s way back out to an ordinary afternoon, and I am recording this, here, by the evening fire, not because I wish to trouble my companions with it but because I wish, by recording it, to externalize it, and in externalizing it to regain something like command of my own mind.
Let me walk, reader, through the rooms of this structure. Bear with me. The structure is small, and the walk is short, and the exit, I am given to hope, opens onto the fire of our second camp and the friendly faces of my party and the next cup of Tobin’s scalding tea, and the ordinary business of tomorrow’s riding.
The first room of the structure is the room of pure visual fact, and it contains what I have already set down: there are five canopies, as there are five layers of the sea, and the sailor-turned-landsman cannot help but notice the correspondence. I have been in this room for two days. It is not a large room. It is not, in itself, frightening. It is merely the room one stands in before one begins to consider what the correspondence implies.
The second room of the structure is the room of navigational displacement, and it is the room in which I have mostly lived today. This room contains the realization that my instincts, which have been tuned for one medium, are betraying me in the inverse medium. Beneath the canopy, as beneath the water’s surface, one cannot easily know where one is. The path we ride is the only path; we are following it; we trust those who walk it ahead of us, which in our case means Ysolde the scout, whom I have come to trust despite my early resolutions against trusting anyone of any kind. But trust in a human scout is not the same thing as trust in a sky that can be read. Trust in a human scout is trust in a single fallible person who may err. Trust in a sky is trust in a system that cannot err, because the sky does not make choices; the sky merely is, and one reads it or one fails to read it. Under the canopy I have no sky to read. I have only Ysolde. Ysolde is excellent. Ysolde is, I will confess, one of the two or three finest scouts I have had the fortune to ride with in any capacity. But Ysolde is one woman, and she is tired, and she is as subject to error as any mortal thing, and the ancient comfort of the sailor — that no matter how inept the captain, the sky above the captain is infallible — has been removed from me for the duration of this passage. I ride in a condition of permanent unsupported trust, and I find that I do not know how to hold this condition for more than a few hours at a time without it beginning to leak. It leaks in the form of mutterings. It leaks in the form of a small compulsive movement of my hand toward the compass every ten or fifteen minutes. It leaks in the form of my having, today, stopped Bramble three separate times without any visible reason, and stood in the path, and looked upward at the canopy, and tried, without success, to see through it to the sky beyond, and having failed, tried again, and having failed again, ridden on with the leaked trust a little more depleted than it had been before. This is what navigational displacement does to a sailor. It empties him by slow degrees of the faith that underwrites his profession. I have been emptying for two days. I am not yet empty, but I can feel the lower quarters of my tank begin to announce themselves.
The third room of the structure is the room of pressure. In the sea, pressure increases with depth, and the pressure at the trenches is such that a human being cannot survive at all, and a human-made instrument can survive only if it has been specifically designed to withstand the pressure. In the inverse sea of the wood, pressure does not behave exactly this way, but I have come to suspect, over the long green hours of this second day, that something like pressure does operate here, and that it increases not with depth below the canopy but with depth of awareness, if you will permit me that formulation. What I mean is this. A man who rides through the wood without paying any particular attention feels no pressure at all. He feels the trees, the path, the horse, the ordinary weight of a traveler’s day. But a man who rides through the wood and begins to notice — who begins to notice that the canopy is five layers, that the light is green in different degrees at different heights, that the birdsong is not birdsong, that the silences are not empty silences but held ones, that the shrine at the clearing has been visited by people for centuries and has been acknowledged with a held low note, that the wood has preferences and attentions and discriminations — such a man begins to feel a pressure. It is a soft pressure at first. It is the gentle pressure of the twilight zone, perhaps, fifty fathoms down. It is not crushing. But it is unmistakable. And as one’s awareness deepens, the pressure deepens, and I am here to tell you, reader, that I have reached, over the course of this second day, a depth of awareness at which the pressure is noticeable to the point of being uncomfortable, and I suspect that some of my companions — Aldric, certainly, who has been composing verse at a pace that suggests a mind under considerable strain; Tobin, who has gone unusually quiet — have reached similar depths. Only Ysolde seems to swim in the pressure without apparent difficulty, and only Seraphine seems to have had the discipline to keep her awareness calibrated to precisely the depth she judges useful without going deeper. The rest of us are at depths we did not mean to descend to, and the pressure is telling on us, and I am not certain how far down one can go in this wood before the pressure exceeds what a soul can bear.
The fourth room of the structure is the room of inhabitants. This is the room that frightens me most, and which I approach, now, with the deliberation of a man opening a door he would rather leave closed. It is the room in which one asks, not what the layers are, but who lives in them.
In the sea, the layers are populated. Every sailor knows this. We know the populations of the surface layer intimately: the mackerel, the cod, the herring, the porpoise, the gull that skims the waves, the particular kinds of jellyfish that drift in the upper fathoms. We know, less intimately, the populations of the twilight layer: the certain kinds of squid that rise at night to feed, the hatchetfish, the lanternfish. We know, only by report and by the occasional trawl net that pulls up something strange, the populations of the midnight zone: the anglerfish with its illuminated lure, the gulper eel, the giant squid that wrestles the sperm whale in the dark. And below these, in the abyssal plain and the trenches, we know, by occasional reports that we trade in taverns and discount in daylight, certain shapes and certain behaviors that do not fit any naturalist’s catalogue, and that a wise sailor does not speculate upon at length lest the speculation acquire substance.
The wood, I have come to suspect, has its own populations at its own layers. The fifth canopy, the one nearest us, is populated by ordinary birds and ordinary insects and the small ordinary creatures of an ordinary forest, and this population is known to us, and presents no mystery. The fourth canopy is populated by birds that are not quite birds, by whatever spoke the silver-wire phrase that Ysolde answered, by things that can compose a four-part harmony in eight seconds around the voice of a lass who has whistled to them. This population is already strange, but it is at least polite, and it has so far shown itself willing to greet us rather than to consume us. The third canopy, which I glimpse only through the occasional gap, is populated by I-do-not-know-what, because I-do-not-know-what is what lives at depths I do not have the equipment to survey. The second canopy is populated by matters I am not yet prepared to name. And the first canopy, the highest layer, which I cannot see at all, which I have no access to, which I can only infer the existence of from the quality of the green-gold light that reaches me through it — that first canopy is populated by whatever populates it, and the populators look down, perhaps, at our tiny party on the path, the way the things in the trenches look up, perhaps, at a passing ship, and they have, perhaps, opinions of us, and they have, perhaps, appetites.
I am being honest with you, reader. I am trying to give you the shape of my day’s meditation without softening it. I am a man of the water. I am permitted my cosmic unease. It is the one luxury my profession allows me, and I spend it freely.
The fifth room of the structure — and this is the deepest room, the room whose door I am now at, the room whose crossing of the threshold is the reason I will need Tobin’s scalding tea when I emerge from this meditation — is the room of the self. And in this room, the question is not who lives in the layers above, but what I am, in relation to those layers.
In the sea, I was a sailor, which meant I was a creature of the surface layer who understood that his entire professional existence consisted of moving across the top of a fathomless depth without penetrating it. The surface layer was my world; the twilight zone was my neighbor, not my home; the midnight zone and below were rumors. I lived on the surface. I was a surface being. I accepted this and I thrived on it, for as long as I thrived on anything, which was some time, but not all times.
I drowned, reader. I drowned twice. I have told you this in passing and I will not dwell on the specifics, because the specifics are private. But when a sailor drowns, he does not drown at the surface. He drowns by descending. He is pulled down through the surface layer into the twilight, and from the twilight further down into the midnight, and his drowning is in fact a kind of unwilling tour of the layers his professional existence had been dedicated to not touring. A man who has drowned once has seen the twilight. A man who has drowned twice has, if he is honest, seen something deeper than that. I have seen something deeper. I do not talk about it. I will not talk about it now. But I will say this: when a man has been drawn down through the twilight zone of his native sea and has returned, he comes back a different man. He comes back with the knowledge that the surface is not a separate kingdom from the depths, but merely the topmost layer of a single great body of water that contains both him and everything he had preferred not to contemplate. He comes back understanding that the layers are continuous. That the line between the surface and the midnight is a gradient, not a border. That at any moment, any surface sailor, in any ordinary water, may be drawn down into the layers he had pretended to live above, and he will find, when he is drawn down, that the layers were there the whole time, and that he had been a tourist of the upper fathoms by a courtesy the sea extended to him and could at any moment withdraw.
And this, reader — this is the confession I have been approaching for the whole of this segment, and which I had not meant to make, and which I am now making because I have written myself into the corner from which the only honest exit is the confession — this is what the wood has done to me. The wood has shown me, by the patient demonstration of its canopy, that a wood is a sea, and that I have been, without realizing it, at the surface of a sea for two days, and that I have been riding along the waterline of an inverted ocean whose trenches are populated by matters I do not know. And because I have drowned twice in the original sea, I know what it is to be drawn down through the layers against one’s will. And because I know what it is to be drawn down, I know that it can happen in this inverted sea, also, that I could at any moment be drawn upward — upward into the fourth canopy, upward into the third canopy, upward into the second canopy, upward into the first canopy, upward into the sky I have not seen for two days, which is the surface of this inverted ocean as surely as the waterline is the surface of the ordinary one — and I do not know what would become of me if I were drawn upward. I do not know, reader, whether a third drowning would be possible, in an element other than water, and I do not know whether I would survive it, and I do not know, if I did survive it, what manner of creature I would be on my return.
This is the thought I have had today. This is the thought that has ridden with me and with Bramble through the long green hours, while Ysolde sang her small scout’s songs at the head of the column and while Tobin hummed his grandfatherly undersong in the middle and while Aldric composed his frightened verse to my left and while Seraphine kept her exquisite watch behind us all. I have ridden with the thought. I have not shared it. I will not share it, not at tonight’s fire, not tomorrow, not perhaps ever, because there are certain confessions that are not the party’s to bear, and a party that was told every private horror of every member would collapse under the cumulative weight, and a good party member knows which horrors to set down at the communal fire and which horrors to carry privately, and this one I carry privately.
But I will tell you, reader, because you are not the party, and because recording it is the act that slowly defuses it. I will tell you that the thought has not only frightened me. It has also — and here is where the melancholy part of the promised emotion enters — it has also fascinated me, and I have found that I have been fascinated by it in a way that is not entirely healthy but not entirely destructive, and I will try to say what the fascination is.
The fascination is this. If the wood is a sea, and the canopy is a waterline, and the populators of the upper layers are the creatures of the inverted deep, then every tree is, in some metaphorical sense, a column of water reversed, a column of air-become-substance, a pillar of the inverted ocean reaching from the floor of our world toward the floor of theirs. And the trunks of the trees, which I have been passing all day and tying my horse to and leaning my back against at the occasional rest-halt, are, in this imagining, the currents and structures of an ocean I have never seen. And when I lay my palm on a trunk, as I did this afternoon at a rest-halt while Tobin was seeing to the horses, I was laying my palm upon a strand of an inverted sea. And when I leaned my forehead against the trunk, as I then did — I do not know why I did it, reader; I had no plan; I was tired and the trunk was cool and the silver bark was pleasant against my skin — when I leaned my forehead against the trunk, I felt, or I imagined I felt, something thrumming up through the trunk from below, a slow deep pulse, the pulse, perhaps, of this wood’s equivalent of the tidal rhythm, the slow breathing that Tobin’s kettle had matched on first entry, and I thought: this tree is not a tree. This tree is the visible segment of an enormous body, a body that extends downward into the earth by roots I cannot see and upward into the canopy by branches I cannot fully see, and the whole tree is a single coursing channel of some form of slow life, and the wood is composed of thousands of these channels, and the wood taken as a whole is not a collection of trees but a single slow tidal body, breathing as a body breathes, and I am a small passing creature walking along its ventral surface the way a mite walks along the skin of a whale.
This is the fascination, reader. It is the fascination of a man who has spent his life believing himself to live on the skin of one great body (the sea) and who has now discovered, late, that there is another great body (the wood) whose skin he had been walking on all the while without noticing. Two great bodies. Probably more. Probably the desert is a third. Probably the mountains are a fourth. Probably the sky itself is a fifth, and the stars are the surface layer of some medium I have not been told the name of. A man of my age does not easily acquire new great bodies. The discovery of one is the work of a lifetime; the discovery of two, late, is a shock to the soul; the suspicion that there may be three or more, that one has been stepping across the skins of several unknown entities for the entire duration of one’s professional existence without having been aware of it, is the kind of shock that either kills a man outright or opens him to a kind of wonder he had not realized was still available to him.
I have not been killed. I will say that plainly. I have been opened. I am open now. I am riding along the ventral surface of a great slow wood-body, and I am feeling, for the first time in many years, something I had not expected to feel again, which is awe. The awe is not unmixed. The awe is edged with the fear I have already named. The awe is edged, also, with the melancholy that is the native flavor of any awe a drowned man permits himself, for a drowned man’s awe always comes to him with the memory of drowning pressed into its underside, and he cannot feel awe without tasting, simultaneously, the salt of his own remembered dying. But the awe is there. It is real. I have felt it. I am recording it, here, so that I may read it back later, in some tavern on some cynical afternoon, and be reminded that I was capable of it.
And I will tell you one further thing, reader, and then I will stop, because the fire is burning down and Tobin is looking at me with the particular half-lidded look that means he has been watching me write for some time and has decided that I have written enough. I will tell you that the other members of this party have, I believe, each been having their own version of this day. Aldric has been composing his rhymed overwhelm and I think he has been composing it because the wood has been showing him a body of knowledge he had not known existed and whose bibliography he is attempting to organize on the fly. Ysolde has been scouting her hedgerows-become-infinite and I think she has been half in love with the wood since yesterday and is perhaps becoming three-quarters in love with it today and the love is not entirely wise but neither is it entirely dangerous, not yet. Seraphine has been walking her perimeter watch with the slightly different set to her shoulders that I have begun to be able to read, and I believe she has been calculating, in her cool continental way, how one would actually operate professionally in an inverted ocean, and I believe she is pleased to find that the answer is not fundamentally different from operating professionally in an ordinary medium, and this has reassured her. And Tobin — Tobin, I cannot read Tobin today. Tobin has been quiet. Tobin has been watching his kettle. Tobin has been humming his undersong that matches the wood’s pulse. Tobin, I think, is not experiencing the wood as a revelation. Tobin, I think, has been in woods like this before, and knows them. I will, at some later hour, ask Tobin about this. Not tonight. Tonight is for his scalding tea and his steady presence across the fire from mine.
I have been writing by the light of the fire, reader, for perhaps two hours now, longer than I have written at a stretch since I was a young man. My hand is cramped. My ink is low. The fire is down to embers. The others are in their bedrolls, except for Seraphine, who is sitting watch at the far edge of the hollow, and who has, once or twice in the last hour, glanced across the ember-light at me and given me the small professional nod of a watcher who sees that another member of the party is awake and working and does not need intervention. I have returned the nod each time. We are keeping each other company, across the dying fire, in our respective silences.
I will close the book. I will bank the fire. I will lie down on my bedroll. I will sleep, I think, better tonight than I did last night, because the long day of meditation has had its effect, and because the meditation has bottomed out, as meditations eventually do, at the place where the meditator has said enough and can now rest. I will wake tomorrow, and we will ride further into the green, and the pressure of my awareness will continue to increase, and the inhabitants of the upper canopies will continue to watch us or not, according to their inclinations, and I will continue to be a small passing mite on the ventral surface of the great slow wood-body, and I will ride, and I will mutter, and I will continue on.
But before I lie down, I will say one more thing, because I have earned it by the length of this segment, and because it is the truest thing I have written tonight.
I am afraid, reader. I am afraid of the canopy and of what lives above it and of what might reach down from it and draw me up into a third drowning I have no preparation for. That fear is real and I will not pretend otherwise.
And yet, underneath the fear, beneath the twilight zone of the fear, somewhere in the midnight zone of my own soul, there is a thing that is not fear, a thing I have not felt in many years, a thing I had declared dead in me and was mistaken about. It is curiosity. It is the old sailor’s curiosity about the next horizon, the next landfall, the next port whose name he has not yet heard. It is the curiosity of a creature who has been given, unexpectedly, a second world to sail in. I do not know whether I will sail this second world well. I do not know whether I will sail it long. But I have noticed, in the last hour, that I would like to see more of it. I would like to see the second canopy. I would like to understand what lives in the third layer. I would like, if it is permitted me, and if I survive the inversion long enough, to one day stand in a clearing large enough to see upward all the way to the sky above this wood, and to see, for the first time in three days, a cloud. And I would like to see whether the cloud, when I see it, looks to me the way clouds looked to me before I entered the wood, or whether it looks different, because I have been changed by the passage below the canopy, and can no longer read the cloud the way I used to read it.
That curiosity, reader, is the small warm coin I have been given today in exchange for the long cold fear. It is, I think, the coin that Ysolde has in her pocket and that Tobin has in his and that Aldric has, in his scholar’s way, been writing into his tome all evening. It is, perhaps, the coin that parties are made of, when parties are real. It is the coin we earn by riding together through the inverted ocean and by sitting together at the fire afterward and by setting down, each in our own medium, the shape of the day we have survived.
I will put the coin in my inner pocket, beside the compass that points to the nearest body of significant water, and which today has been pointing, I noticed idly at the shrine-clearing, not outward toward any known stream, but inward, downward, into the earth beneath the wood, as though there were a great body of water directly below us that no surface map has ever recorded. I did not mention this to the party. I will mention it tomorrow, if the moment seems right. For now, the needle is where it is, and the wood is what it is, and I, Balthazar, twice-drowned and provisionally re-skinned, am going to lie down on my bedroll in this hollow and try to dream of the open sea that I know, rather than the closed sea that I am learning, because a man is entitled to dream, on the second night of his first voyage into an inverted ocean, of the medium he was born for.
Good night, reader. The canopy goes on. The wood breathes its slow body-breath. Seraphine keeps her watch. Tobin sleeps. Aldric composes even in his sleep, I will wager. Ysolde is curled like a cat, and whatever the wood thinks of Ysolde, it has not harmed her, and I am grateful for that, because I find I have grown fond of Ysolde, and I would prefer the wood not to take her, even if I have not yet found the words to say so aloud.
I close the book. I bank the fire. The ink runs out at exactly the end of this sentence, which the old gods of ink are said to arrange when a meditation has come to its natural close, and I will accept the arrangement with the small reluctant gratitude that is, I suspect, all that Balthazar Vex will ever permit himself to feel toward the old gods of anything.
Good night.
Segment 9: The Ambush of the Mossbound Thieves
The trail had narrowed, some hours after the noon-halt, to the particular width at which two horses might pass abreast only by mutual consent of their riders, and at which a single rider with any ordinary prudence chose instead to ride the others nose-to-tail in an unbroken line; and the line in which the company now moved was, in its familiar order, Ysolde at the head upon the dun mare, Aldric behind her upon his grey gelding, Balthazar at the middle of the column upon his patient brown, Tobin after Balthazar upon the ambling roan, and Seraphine at the rear upon the fine-boned black whose name she had never troubled to announce to the party and whom she called, privately, Andromache, after a woman of earlier acquaintance whose composure the mare had seemed to her to possess. It had rained for perhaps an hour just after noon, a soft green rain that did not properly reach them under the canopy but that came through as a fine irregular dripping from the overhead leaves, and the trail underfoot had become darker and spongier, and the hoofbeats of the horses had acquired the muffled quality of hoofbeats upon a forest floor too damp to return a proper echo, and the air smelled of wet bark and of the particular wild pepper that grew low beneath the silver-barked trees of this part of the wood and whose leaves, when crushed underfoot, released a scent that she would have found pleasant in any circumstance other than the present one, in which she had spent the last ninety minutes increasingly certain that they were about to be attacked.
She had not yet told the others. The decision not to tell them was itself a calculation she would need to account for later, at some interior court where she judged her own conduct, but the calculation had been made in the first seven minutes of her becoming certain, and she had determined that telling them would produce no advantage commensurate with the cost — the cost being the alteration of their natural bearing, the stiffening of the shoulders, the involuntary glances over the shoulder that betray a party to its observers, the loss, in short, of the single advantage she still possessed, which was that her own knowledge of the ambush’s imminence had not yet been discovered by the ambushers. She had therefore withheld the knowledge, and she had ridden at the rear with her face composed in the mild undistinguished composure of a woman bored by the long afternoon, and she had watched, with the whole of her art, the very small signs by which a professional of her acquaintance tells a professional of comparable acquaintance that the pursuit has closed.
She had begun to suspect them about an hour before the rain. The suspicion had begun with the particular kind of bird-silence that settles upon a wood not when a large predator is near but when a small number of humans, moving with skill, are paralleling a trail through the undergrowth at a distance of between fifty and one hundred yards. Ysolde had, of course, felt this silence earlier than Seraphine had — Ysolde’s forest-sense was faster than her own — but Ysolde had, to her credit, not remarked upon it, having understood at once that Seraphine would also have felt it and that any overt remark would alert any observers that the party had perceived their flanking. Ysolde had instead, some twenty minutes into the silence, shifted the key of her quiet riding-song by a half-step and had sung the new key in her ordinary easy manner, and Seraphine, catching the half-step at the rear of the column, had understood that Ysolde had sent her a message in the only medium their improvised shorthand presently allowed, and that the message read: they are at our flank, I count two, probably three, moving fast. She had returned the acknowledgment by humming a very small two-note descending figure under her own breath that Ysolde, whose hearing was better than any of the others’, would catch at the head of the column, and the acknowledgment carried the further information that she, too, had counted the flankers and had independently assessed their number and pace. Ysolde’s song had subsequently continued without further modulation, which had told Seraphine that Ysolde had received the acknowledgment, and the two of them had ridden on in the particular alert calmness of two professionals who have silently agreed to let the enemy complete their approach rather than to spring the trap prematurely and thereby forfeit the tactical initiative that came with being the party upon whom the trap was to be sprung.
The particular identity of the flankers had not, at first, been certain to her. She had considered several possibilities. The first was ordinary forest bandits of the kind that operated at the edges of enchanted woods in the hope of preying upon the inexperienced travelers who ventured the approach without adequate defenses. This possibility she had discarded within ten minutes, because ordinary bandits did not pace a party in silence for an hour; they attacked at the first appropriate terrain, or they did not attack at all. The second possibility was that the flankers were agents of the wood itself, whatever the wood’s agency might consist of; this she had discarded somewhat more slowly, because she was not entirely certain what the wood’s agency consisted of, and she had been watching, since their first entry into the green, for signs of any such agency that might turn hostile. But the quality of the flanking was wrong for the wood; the wood, in all its expressions so far, had moved with the fluid assurance of a thing native to its terrain, and the flankers moved with the slightly-too-careful stealth of humans trained in stealth but not born to it. The third possibility — the one that, with increasing probability, she had come to settle upon in the last forty minutes — was that the flankers were their rivals from the Four Winds, the four competent gentlemen of the corner table, or some subset of those four, catching the party at last upon the narrow trail where the terrain favored an ambush and where the canopy denied the defenders their usual tactical options of rapid mounted flight or rapid mounted scatter.
She had begun to be certain, some twenty minutes before the moment of the ambush, that it was three of the four, and not all four, who had flanked them. The fourth, she suspected, had remained some distance behind on the trail itself, to cut off retreat in the event that the three ambushers’ efforts failed, and to provide, thereby, the closing wing of a pincer that would, if executed properly, have trapped the party between the flankers and the rear-rider. The identification of the absent fourth had required a further judgment on her part. The likely candidate was the leader of the corner-table company, the educated man whose voice had carried the private Valmontois pressure on the second syllable; he would have assigned himself the position of greatest strategic value, which in a pincer of this kind was the rear-rider position, from which the outcome of the ambush could be observed and either reinforced or disavowed according to the commander’s judgment. The three flankers were therefore Master Huberd of the money-belt, the fourth man of the too-long smile who had spoken of perfume, and the third man, the silent one, who was the blade. She had allowed herself, upon concluding this distribution, a very brief private pleasure of the kind she permitted herself when a pattern resolved into the shape she had predicted — the brief pleasure of the chess-player who has, four moves in advance, foreseen her opponent’s disposition and now confirms the prediction in the actual board.
There remained, as always, the question of timing. The flankers would not attack the column at an arbitrary point along the trail; they would select the point at which the terrain most favored them. The trail had been narrowing for some minutes, and she had observed, with the peripheral part of her attention, that a dense thicket of low juniper or some juniper-like shrub had begun to encroach upon the left side of the path some three hundred yards ahead, while on the right side the path passed close to a small shallow ravine choked with deadfall; a rider pushed from the path at that point would fall sideways into the ravine and require perhaps ninety seconds to recover himself or herself and the horse, during which interval the rest of the column would be engaged and the fallen rider would be effectively subtracted from the engagement. That was the point. That would be where the ambush would come. She estimated, given their current pace, some two minutes until the column reached that point; she estimated, given the flankers’ rate of closure and their need to be in final position before the column arrived, that the flankers would be crossing from their paralleling line to their attack line within the next sixty to ninety seconds. She had, therefore, a window of perhaps a minute to prepare herself without disturbing the composure of the column.
She used the minute as follows.
She first, with the smallest possible motion of her right hand, unpinned the dagger-pin at her chest. She did not remove it from the fabric; she merely loosened the clasp so that the blade would unseat from the brooch at the slightest upward pressure of her thumb and forefinger. This adjustment required perhaps two seconds and produced no visible alteration in her posture. Her left hand, which had been resting composed upon her thigh, she moved by imperceptible degrees until it rested instead upon the pommel of her saddle, in a position from which she could, if necessary, swing her right leg over and dismount in a single fluid motion without tangling her skirt. Her reins she transferred, similarly, from both hands to her left alone, so that her right was free. She verified, by the tiniest tension of her knee, that Andromache had received her unspoken instruction to hold still and to respond to pressure alone; the mare’s right ear flicked back once, in acknowledgment, and settled forward again. These preparations were complete in perhaps fifteen seconds. They left her forty-five seconds to spare, and during the forty-five seconds she did the one further thing she could do without alerting the approaching ambushers to her state of readiness: she composed the first lie.
The first lie, in her private lexicon, was not a specific falsehood; it was a category of utterance. A first lie was the sentence spoken at the opening of an engagement that was designed to move the opponent’s attention by a single measured degree in a direction of her choosing. The first lie was always short, always plausible, always in the register of the speaker’s established persona, and always — this was its critical property — true-seeming in its first half and false in its second, so that the opponent’s mind, in processing the first half as true, was primed to accept the second half as true also before the falsity of the second half could be consciously identified. She had used the first lie perhaps a hundred times in her professional life. She had never found it to fail entirely; the most it had ever done was to work partially, which was to produce a one-eighth-second hesitation in the opponent rather than a full half-second, and a one-eighth-second hesitation was, in the kind of engagement she conducted, more than enough.
She composed the first lie for this ambush as follows. She considered what the ambushers would be looking for when they emerged. They would be looking, she judged, for signs of defensive preparation; they would be looking for which member of the column was the combat priority; they would be looking for the position of the party’s apparent leader. She therefore constructed a first lie that would direct their attention away from these three categories of observation and toward a different category of her own choosing. The category she chose was surprise. She would allow them to believe, for the first half-second of the engagement, that the party had not seen them coming. She would allow Master Huberd or the fourth man or the blade to believe, in the instant of their emergence, that they had caught the column unprepared. She would produce, in that instant, a small visible indicator of unpreparedness — a delayed turn of the head, a soft exclamation of civilized surprise, the ambiguous half-rising of a woman attempting to pull her horse away from a sudden startlement — and in the half-second during which the ambushers’ minds processed this indicator as confirmation of their own tactical success, she would be moving. She had used the technique before, in a corridor in Valmont, with a different dagger-pin, against a different three men, and she had walked away from that corridor alive while the three men had not, and the pattern of that earlier engagement had given her the template for this one.
The forty-five seconds elapsed. The first of the three flankers emerged.
He emerged, as she had expected, from the left, from the juniper thicket, and he was the fourth man, the one of the long smile, and he emerged with a crossbow already drawn and leveled. He did not shout. He did not announce himself. He raised the crossbow to the firing position and he addressed the column in a voice she did not recognize from the corner table, a harder voice, cleaned of its previous warmth, the voice he had presumably used in whatever earlier profession had given him his callus in the web of his thumb. The voice said: “Hold. Dismount. Hands open.”
Almost simultaneously, Master Huberd emerged from the right, from the edge of the ravine, without a crossbow but with a short sword drawn and held low, and behind Master Huberd and slightly upslope the third man — the blade — emerged with a thin long blade of his own, held in the relaxed grip of a man who had held many such blades and would hold many more. The three ambushers had arranged themselves, as she had predicted, so that the fourth man’s crossbow covered the column’s forward motion and Master Huberd’s sword covered the column’s rightward escape and the blade’s position covered the column’s rearward escape. She, at the rear, was therefore the member of the column nearest the blade, which was, she noted with her continuing private pleasure at the resolution of patterns, exactly the distribution she had expected and had prepared for.
She performed the first lie.
She turned her head toward the fourth man with what appeared to be delayed civilian startlement, and she said, in a voice pitched two tones higher than her usual continental murmur, a voice of the drawing-room rather than of the trail, “Sirs, sirs — I beg you — we are a party of pilgrims — we have no — ” and she let her right hand rise, palm open, the gesture of a woman showing that she was unarmed, and in the gesture her right thumb and forefinger closed upon the dagger-pin at her chest and unpinned it in the same motion, and the dagger-pin was in her palm concealed by her extended fingers, and the fourth man’s eyes, trained as they were by his profession to watch the hands, did not see the dagger-pin because her other gesture, the upward rise of the palm, had exactly been calibrated to draw his gaze to the wrist-bone rather than to the inner palm, and his attention was for the crucial one-eighth second diverted, and in that one-eighth second she had invoked, silently, the small active of the dagger-pin she called the Measured Cut.
The Measured Cut required her to make a single attack with advantage against a surprised target. She had surprised the fourth man by the first lie. She had surprised him by being a woman who said “pilgrims” and then produced a blade. She had surprised him, also — and this had been harder to arrange — by being the member of the column he had not been designated to engage; his designation had been the front of the column, the crossbow covering Ysolde and Aldric, and the transfer of his attention to the rear of the column to receive her civilian-sounding protest had been a small tactical error on his part, a natural error, the kind an ambusher makes when an unexpected speaker speaks, but an error nonetheless. The advantage was hers. She took it.
The dagger-pin left her hand in the throw that required no prior signaling motion — a throw she had been taught by a woman in Valmont whose name she had never known and whose technique had cost Seraphine three seasons of private practice to acquire — and the dagger-pin traveled the eleven feet between her position and the fourth man’s throat in perhaps a third of a second, and the blade entered the soft place above his collarbone precisely where it needed to enter to reach the great vein, and the fourth man’s crossbow discharged, but his hand had already lost its coordination with his eye, and the bolt flew upward past Aldric’s shoulder and into the canopy above the trail, where it lodged, and the fourth man fell backward into the juniper thicket, and he was not quite dead in the half-second of his falling but he was finished, and the Measured Cut had worked, and the engagement was, in its first move, hers.
She invoked, in the same motion of her already-extended hand, the second active of the dagger-pin, which was the Pin’s Return. The pin flew back to her hand from the fourth man’s throat along the invisible trajectory by which such small magical items returned to their attuned owners, and by the time Master Huberd on the right and the blade on her immediate rear had processed what had happened to their companion, she had the dagger-pin in her hand again and was in the motion of dismounting, and Andromache had received the knee-signal to hold still and was standing at the composed attention of a well-trained mare in an engagement she had been trained to expect, and Seraphine was on the ground with the dagger-pin in her right hand and the full half-second of the ambushers’ shock still available to her.
She had been aware, throughout these two seconds of engagement, of the rest of her party. Her awareness was the peripheral awareness of a conductor who hears every section of the orchestra while attending primarily to the one she is leading. Ysolde, at the front of the column, had — she had heard the sound — already dismounted in a single fluid motion and had produced a hand-axe from her saddlebag and was moving, she estimated, toward the fourth man’s position to confirm his death and to recover the crossbow; Ysolde had, as Seraphine had predicted she would, improvised immediately and correctly. Aldric, more surprisingly, had not panicked; he had produced from his chest the pilgrim’s tome and was holding it, she saw from the corner of her eye, open at a marked page, and was reading in a low rapid voice a passage she did not have time to identify but which produced, in the immediate vicinity of Master Huberd, a sudden sheet of thin purple light that crossed Huberd’s eyes at the critical instant and produced a half-second of flinching; Aldric’s tome had apparently contained, all along, a defensive active he had not previously mentioned, and she made a note to praise him later for his reticence on this point. Balthazar, in the middle of the column, had dismounted by dropping sideways out of the saddle and was already behind his horse with his brass compass out and — she saw with some satisfaction — with one of the hand-axes he had bought at Haverfold in his other hand, and he was shouting, in the full harbor voice that she had not previously heard him use, the single word “Tobin!”, which she understood to be an instruction to Tobin to drop behind the roan and take cover. Tobin had already done so; Tobin had dropped behind the roan before Balthazar’s shout, and Tobin was crouched with his iron ladle in one hand and his whittled stick in the other and was, she saw, not crouched in the posture of a frightened old man but in the low ready posture of a fighter who had simply, for a particular engagement, chosen not to stand tall.
The distribution of the party was, she noted, entirely satisfactory. Every member was in position. Every member was executing a function. No member required her intervention. She was therefore free to attend to the blade, who was her own engagement.
The blade had recovered from the shock of the fourth man’s death with impressive speed. He had covered the eleven feet between his initial emergence position and her current dismounted position in perhaps a second, and he was on her now, his thin long blade already in motion in the first stroke of a technique she recognized from a school that had been taught, some thirty years ago, in a particular academy in the north, and she understood at once that he had been trained in that academy or had been trained by someone who had been, and she knew the school’s techniques, and she knew their openings, and she knew, most usefully, their three characteristic weaknesses. The third characteristic weakness was the one she exploited. The school’s instructors had taught their students to compensate for a particular defensive gap by a reflexive withdrawal-step of the left foot at a moment when the right foot should have held; every graduate of the school had the withdrawal-step drilled into him to such depth that no amount of subsequent training could eradicate it. She had, on three previous occasions, killed graduates of that school by setting up the exact sequence that produced the withdrawal-step and then attacking the knee that the withdrawal had briefly exposed.
She did this.
She performed the entering feint of the sequence in a form so precise that the blade’s body recognized it before his mind did, and his body performed the withdrawal-step, and in the three-quarters of a second during which his weight was on the left foot alone and his right knee was exposed, she did not strike at the knee, because striking at the knee would have failed to incapacitate a man of his training quickly enough; instead she stepped inside his reach, into the narrow gap between his blade and his body, and she drove the dagger-pin into the soft place below his ribcage on the left side at the angle that transected the descending aorta, and she twisted the pin a quarter-turn, and she withdrew it, and the blade made the sound a swordsman makes when the body’s primary blood vessel has been severed, which is a small involuntary cough rather than an exclamation, and his long thin blade clattered against the side of her ankle because his grip had gone loose, and he fell, not backward as the fourth man had, but forward, onto his face, onto the wet leaves of the trail, and she stepped back from him with the same small fluid step by which she had stepped in, and the blade was dead before his body had finished settling.
This had taken, from the first emergence of the fourth man to the death of the blade, perhaps five seconds.
She lifted her eyes to assess Master Huberd.
Master Huberd had, during the five seconds, experienced Aldric’s defensive flash, had flinched, had recovered, had begun to move toward Aldric with his short sword raised, had seen Ysolde flanking him from her forward dismount with the hand-axe already cocked, had turned to address Ysolde, had seen Ysolde was too close and too well-positioned, had turned again to retreat, and had then seen — she watched him see it — that the fourth man was dead in the juniper and the blade was dead on the path and the small elegant woman in plum velvet who had asked him about the etymology of a word at the corner table was walking toward him with an unpinned dagger-pin in her right hand and the unhurried tread of a woman whose decision had already been made. He dropped his short sword.
He dropped it, reader, the way a man drops a tool when he understands the tool is no longer useful to him and the continued holding of it is producing a misunderstanding he cannot afford. He opened his hands, palms outward, and he said, in the harsher voice he had been using since his emergence, “Quarter. Quarter. I yield.”
She had expected this. She had calibrated her approach to allow for it. She stopped at a distance from him of perhaps three paces, which was the distance at which she could reach him in a half-second if he moved and at which he could not reach her at all, and she said, in her lower and more composed voice, the voice of the corner table, “Kneel, Master Huberd. Hands behind your head.”
He knelt. He put his hands behind his head. She observed his face as he did so. His face was not the face of a professional who had been defeated; it was the face of a professional who had known, from the first five seconds of the engagement, that he was going to be defeated, and who had chosen to remain alive at the cost of the surrender rather than to die in the theater of the fight. She respected him for this. It was the response of a man who had correctly assessed the balance of forces and had preferred his life to his dignity, which was, in her professional view, the mature choice, and which marked him as the member of the corner table’s party best suited to survive the engagement and therefore most likely to be useful to her afterward. She had preserved him, in effect, for this utility. She would not have preserved the blade, who was too skilled and too committed to survive as her prisoner; she would not have preserved the fourth man, who had drawn first and had attempted to kill her scholar; she had preserved Master Huberd because Master Huberd had held the money-belt, which meant he had held the records, which meant he knew the names of his employers, which meant he was an information asset, and Seraphine did not waste information assets.
“Ysolde,” she said, without taking her eyes from Master Huberd. “If you would be so kind.”
Ysolde arrived at her side in perhaps four seconds with the length of good Haverfold hemp that Balthazar had purchased at the rope-seller, and Ysolde bound Master Huberd’s wrists behind his back with a knot Seraphine did not recognize but which she could tell, by the particular tightness of it, was a knot designed by country people for restraining livestock, and which would be harder for Master Huberd to work free of than any knot a city jailer might have used. Ysolde then, at Seraphine’s nod, crossed to the fourth man’s position in the juniper and confirmed by the old rural method — a hand placed upon the wrist, held there ten seconds, then against the throat — that he was dead. She returned, carrying the crossbow, and she carried it the way a woman carries a piece of unfamiliar equipment she intends to examine later, without deference to its former owner.
“There’s another,” Ysolde said.
“Yes,” said Seraphine. “Behind us on the trail. The rear-rider.”
“Want me to scout him?”
“No. He will be running by now. The engagement has lasted long enough for him to have heard the commotion, and having failed to hear any shouted signal from his team, he will have concluded that the ambush failed, and he will have turned his horse and be returning to wherever he came from to report the failure to his employer. A chase would be costly and might fail. Let him go. His return will furnish our employer — or rather his — with a useful misdirection.”
“Misdirection?”
“He will report that three members of his party were lost. He will not know how. He will report that the party attempting to take the artifact was more formidable than his reconnaissance had indicated. The organization that sent him will therefore adjust their expectation upward regarding our capacity, and they will either dispatch a second and larger team — which will take time, and which will be easier for us to detect on the approach — or they will abandon their project of intercepting us on the road and will attempt instead to reach the ruins ahead of us by a different route. Either of these responses serves us. We should not spend the life of a horse trying to prevent the rear-rider from reporting, because his report is the second half of today’s work.”
Ysolde looked at her, and Seraphine saw in Ysolde’s face the small new consideration of a woman who had just understood, in one listening, the layered strategic utility of sparing an enemy one had the capacity to kill. Ysolde nodded slowly and said, “All right. Let him run.”
“Thank you, Ysolde.”
She turned her attention again to Master Huberd, who knelt in the wet leaves with his hands bound behind his head and his face composed in the neutral attention of a professional awaiting interrogation. She did not, however, begin the interrogation at once. She crossed instead to where the blade lay on his face upon the path, and she turned him over with her foot — not roughly, but with the deliberate gentleness of a woman who had killed a worthy opponent and would not add insult to the killing — and she looked at his face. He had been perhaps thirty-five. He had been a man who had maintained himself, whose beard had been trimmed this morning, whose collar had been turned this morning, whose blade had been oiled this morning. He had been a professional, and he had been a good one, and she had killed him, and she noted with a small interior clarity that she did not regret having killed him, because he had been attempting to kill her scholar and her scout, and she had defended them, and the defense had been correct.
She did not regret the blade.
She did not regret the fourth man, either. She thought about this as she crossed back to Master Huberd. The fourth man, who had held the crossbow, who had fired it at Aldric’s position, who had — she now understood, looking at the angle of the bolt lodged in the canopy — only missed Aldric by the thickness of a finger because Aldric had, at the critical instant, tilted his head toward his tome to read the defensive passage. If Aldric had been upright, the bolt would have taken him in the right eye. The fourth man had therefore attempted to murder her scholar, and she had killed him before he could attempt again, and she did not regret this either.
The single regret she carried — the single regret she had carried in her chest since the moment of the blade’s falling, and which she had now permitted herself, in the small after-moment of the engagement, to name — was the blade’s technique. She regretted the technique. She regretted that the school which had taught the blade had taught him so well, and had taught him so ill, and had sent him forth into the world with a skill set that contained its own fatal flaw, and she regretted that she had been one of now three women in the profession who knew this flaw and had exploited it, and she regretted, most of all, that the blade himself had probably known about the flaw — any graduate of the school of his generation would have been warned about the withdrawal-step, would have been drilled in compensatory techniques, would have spent years attempting to correct it — and had been killed not by his ignorance but by the failure of his long training to correct it. He had, in the five seconds of the engagement, done everything the school had taught him to do, and his body’s response had nonetheless produced the withdrawal-step, because some patterns laid down deep cannot be overwritten by any amount of later effort, and she regretted that he had died of this, that he had died of his earliest lessons rather than his best ones, that somewhere in the house in which he had been a boy there had been an instructor who had taught him the step in the first place, who had meant well, who had thought he was giving the boy a gift, and who had in fact been giving him, three decades later, his death.
The regret was not larger than the gratification. She was honest with herself about this. The gratification — the cold clear professional gratification of having conducted a brief and precise violence with efficiency and without loss to her party — was the dominant emotion of the moment, and it pulsed through her with its quiet pleasant rhythm, the rhythm of a very well-made clockwork that had struck the hour correctly, and she took the gratification as her due. The regret rode beneath the gratification as a single small minor chord rides beneath a dominant major progression, and it was the regret that kept the gratification from becoming vulgar. She had learned, in her earliest years of this work, that the operator who felt only gratification was the operator who had ceased to be a person; the operator who felt only regret was the operator who could no longer function; the operator who felt both, in proportion, was the operator who would still be doing this work in twenty years. She was doing this work in twenty years. She expected to be. The regret for the blade was the tithe she paid for the privilege.
She returned her attention to Master Huberd.
“Master Huberd,” she said. “I am going to ask you a series of questions. You will answer them truthfully. If you do not, I will — not kill you, because I do not intend to kill you today — but I will leave you bound and gagged in this forest, at a distance from the trail, and whatever finds you first will be your companion for the remainder of your life. We are in the enchanted wood. Various things may find you. I leave the details to your imagination.”
Master Huberd considered this. He was a professional, as she had noted, and he considered the offer with the methodical attention of a man weighing a contract. He said, “What kind of questions?”
“The first question is who sent you. The second question is who sent you. The third question is who sent you. I will accept no other structure of answer. I am told, by colleagues of mine in related lines, that the most reliable method of extracting this information is to ask it three times and to listen for the variations among the three answers, because a man under the kind of pressure you are presently under will tell the same truth thrice differently, while a man attempting a lie will tell the same lie thrice identically. You are not, I think, a stupid enough professional to attempt the identical lie. You will therefore tell me the truth three different ways, and I will compare the three. I suggest you begin with the way that is easiest to say, and work your way toward the way that is most precise.”
Master Huberd thought about this for perhaps seven seconds. She watched him think. She was, at this point, entirely confident of him. He was going to tell her what she wanted to know. He had recognized the structure of the situation and had calculated the cost of lying against the cost of telling the truth, and he had correctly estimated that the cost of lying was immeasurably higher, because she had told him, implicitly, that his life would be spared upon his truth, and he had recognized the offer as genuine, because genuine professionals recognized one another. He said, at length:
“We were sent by the Silent Chapter of the Lattice. I do not know the individual name of the one who gave us our writ, because the Silent Chapter’s writs are issued anonymously. I know our case officer by the working name of Brother Uriel, though I doubt that is his true name; he is a tall man, thin, about my age, who came to us at a safe house in the city and paid us in advance for the mission. I believe him to be a senior officer of the Chapter, because the sum advanced was considerable. That is the easiest way of saying it.”
“The second way.”
“The Silent Chapter of the Lattice is a sub-guild of the Lattice of Northern Foundations, which is a collective of related guilds concerned with the acquisition and preservation of certain artifacts from the pre-people civilizations of Saṃsāra. The Silent Chapter is the operational arm of the Lattice, and it is sent into the field when an artifact of particular interest has been identified by the Lattice’s scholars. Our case officer, Brother Uriel, directed us to shadow a party of five questers departing the central city on the date of your departure, with instructions to determine the artifact’s location from your progress, to intercept the artifact when possible, and to eliminate interference by your party by any means available to us. That is the second way.”
“The third way.”
Master Huberd paused. He paused, she noticed, for slightly longer than he had paused before the first answer or the second, and she understood that the third answer was the one he had been dreading, because it was the one that would tell her what he himself had not wished to know, and what he now had no alternative but to say. He said:
“The Silent Chapter of the Lattice believes that the artifact at the end of your quest is not an artifact. They believe it is a power. They believe that the power has begun to stir, within the last decade, for reasons related to the aging of its original binding. They believe that whoever performs the ritual at the Vale will acquire the power. They did not want your Guild to acquire the power. They wanted the Lattice to acquire the power. Our mission, strictly speaking, was to allow your party to reach the Vale and perform the ritual, and then to intercept you on your return with the bound power in your possession, and to take it from you by whatever means proved necessary. The ambush today was an opportunity of convenience — we had pressed closer than we had been authorized to, because our rear-rider believed the terrain favored us, and we attempted to extract the artifact’s estimated location from one of your scholars and to neutralize your lead scout, so as to be better positioned for the later engagement. The attempt was, as you saw, imperfectly planned. I submit that our haste was a professional error. I do not attempt to defend it. That is the third way.”
She regarded him for a long quiet moment.
The third answer had contained, reader, several pieces of information for which she would have paid a considerable sum of gold at any time in the past year. It had confirmed, first, that the artifact at the end of the quest was not in fact an artifact, which was the conclusion Aldric had independently reached by his study of the chapter and had shared with the party the previous evening; Aldric’s reading was therefore vindicated not merely by internal textual evidence but by the external intelligence that a rival organization, working from entirely different sources, had reached the same conclusion. She would tell Aldric this at the earliest private moment; Aldric deserved to know that his scholarship had been confirmed. It had confirmed, second, that the Guild that had sent her own party was not unique in its interest in the Vale and its contents; there was at least one other organization, and a well-resourced one, pursuing the same matter. It had confirmed, third, that the power in question had only recently begun to stir — within the last decade — which located the current crisis in time and suggested, usefully, that the stirring was something that had an identifiable cause, and therefore perhaps an identifiable remedy. It had confirmed, fourth, that the ritual would be the means by which the power was captured; whoever performed the ritual acquired the thing. This was a critical operational detail, because it clarified the stakes of the ritual itself and gave her party the possibility of declining to perform it, or of performing it with an alteration, or of performing it for a purpose other than the Guild’s.
And it had confirmed, fifth — and this was the piece she was filing away with the most care for later consideration — that the Silent Chapter of the Lattice believed the ritual would work for them if they took the bound power from a party that had completed the binding. This meant that the binding produced a transferable possession, and that once the power was bound, the binder could be separated from the binding, and the binding could be acquired by another party. Which meant that the Guild’s plan — to have her party perform the binding and then to bring the bound power home — was premised on a theory of transferability that the Silent Chapter also held. Which meant, very likely, that the theory of transferability was correct. Which meant that if her own party performed the ritual as designed, they would be carrying, for the duration of their return journey, an item of such staggering value that every serious organization on the continent would consider it worth the expense of a strike team to acquire.
This last implication meant that the return journey, should they perform the ritual, would be vastly more dangerous than the outward journey. It also meant that Aldric’s inclination, expressed at last night’s fire, to consider altering the ritual rather than performing it as written, was looking more and more like the strategically correct choice.
She filed all of this. She permitted none of it to show upon her face.
“Thank you, Master Huberd,” she said. “Your third way was the one I needed. We will now discuss what happens to you.”
“I assumed,” said Master Huberd, with the small dry courtesy of his remaining composure, “that I would be released at some point not too far from here, with a warning to stay out of my employer’s reach until the matter is concluded.”
“You assumed correctly. You will walk. You will not be given a horse. Your horse, which I assume is tied somewhere back along the flanking route, will be collected by my people and added to our own train. Your weapons will be kept. You will be bound, at a loose knot that you can work free of in approximately one hour with patience, and we will leave you at the edge of this forest section with the warning that if we encounter you again during this expedition, I will not spare you a second time. You will then walk back to your employer, and you will report what has occurred, and you will emphasize, in your report, that the binder-party you were sent to intercept proved to contain resources the Lattice had not anticipated, and that the Lattice’s estimate of our capacity should be revised upward by a significant margin.”
“I will so report,” said Master Huberd.
“Furthermore,” said Seraphine, “you will carry, in that report, one additional piece of information that I will now give you. You will tell your employer that the binder-party you encountered is aware that the artifact is not an artifact, is aware that the ritual produces a transferable possession, and is aware of the Lattice’s interest in acquiring said possession. You will further tell your employer that the binder-party has not yet decided how it intends to dispose of the possession in question, and that any attempt by the Lattice to influence that decision through further force should be understood in advance to be counterproductive. You will tell your employer that the binder-party is open, at some future date and under proper conditions, to a conversation with the Lattice regarding the disposition of the matter. That is all. Do you understand?”
Master Huberd looked at her for a long moment. She saw him understand, and she saw him, in the same moment, understand the particular quality of the offer she had just made — that she had, in effect, upgraded the Lattice from an adversary to a potential interlocutor, and had done so by the simple expedient of signaling her own party’s awareness of the situation’s full complexity. Master Huberd was old enough and professional enough to appreciate that this was not a charitable offer; this was an opening move in a different game, one that would be played at a different table, and that she had invited his organization to that table. He said, “I understand. I will so report.”
“Thank you.”
She turned to Ysolde. “The edge of the forest section is perhaps three miles west of here. We will take Master Huberd along with us to that point, and we will release him there, with the instructions he has just acknowledged.”
“Aye,” said Ysolde.
“Brother Aldric,” she said, raising her voice slightly so that it carried down the column to where Aldric, still on his gelding, was closing his tome with the composed care of a man putting away a tool that had served him well. “Your defensive passage was exactly timely. Might I inquire, at some later hour, by what item or training you were enabled to produce it?”
“The tome itself,” said Aldric, and she heard in his voice the small pride of a scholar whose instrument had performed correctly in the field. “I shall explain in detail this evening.”
“I look forward to the explanation.”
“Madame,” said Aldric, “I shall also, this evening, have some observations on the intelligence you have just elicited, for certain of its particulars confirm matters I had been provisionally suspecting but had not yet dared declare.”
“I anticipated as much,” she said, and she permitted herself, because the moment allowed it, the smallest half-smile.
She turned to Balthazar, who had emerged from behind his horse with the hand-axe still in his grip and was regarding the scene with the narrow assessing gaze of a man who had not been required to engage but had been ready to, and who was now recalibrating his estimate of his party’s effectiveness. “Master Balthazar,” she said. “Your positioning was exactly correct. Your instruction to Tobin was exactly timely.”
“Balthazar does his work,” muttered Balthazar. “Balthazar does not always have to explain Balthazar’s work. Balthazar would like it known that Balthazar had his axe ready and would have thrown it if necessary.”
“Balthazar’s readiness is noted,” she said gravely, and she saw, at the corner of his mouth, the small satisfied twitch of a man whose competence had been formally acknowledged by a person whose judgment he had recently come to respect.
She turned, last, to Tobin.
Tobin was rising slowly from behind the roan, and as he rose she saw that his posture had returned to its usual amble, and that the iron ladle was back at his waist in its ordinary belt-loop, and that the whittled stick was in his hand as an ambling old man’s walking-aid rather than as the fighter’s weapon it had briefly been. Tobin looked at the bodies on the trail, and at Master Huberd kneeling in the leaves, and at the fourth man in the juniper, and at the bolt lodged in the canopy, and he looked at these things with an expression Seraphine could not read. Then he looked at Seraphine. And Seraphine saw, in his face, a sorrow that was not for the dead — the dead had been her opponents, not his — but for her.
It was a small sorrow, and it was carefully contained, and it was not the sorrow of a man who disapproved of what she had done. Tobin, she understood in the same moment as she saw the sorrow, had approved of what she had done; it had been the correct action under the circumstances; he had trained fighters himself, probably, at some earlier point of his longer-than-admitted life, and he had assessed her work with a professional’s eye and had found it correct. The sorrow was for her, Seraphine, the person, who had killed two men in five seconds without disturbance of her composure, and whose composure throughout had been the composure of a woman who had killed twenty men or thirty men before and who had learned to keep the small shaking that came afterward to an interior register where no one could see it. Tobin saw the interior register. Tobin had been watching for it. Tobin was telling her, with the one slow look, that he saw her, saw all of her, saw the effectiveness and the composure and the regret for the blade’s technique that she had permitted herself, and saw also the thing beneath all of that, the older thing, the thing that had paid the tithe of this composure for longer years than she wished to count, and he was telling her, simply and silently, that he saw the cost.
She had not expected to be seen. She had prepared, in the five seconds of the engagement and in the five minutes of its aftermath, to not be seen. She had prepared to be admired by Ysolde for her speed, assessed by Balthazar for her competence, praised by Aldric for her defense of his person, and so on through the expected reactions of a party that had just witnessed one of its members execute a small precise violence on their behalf. She had not prepared to be seen. She did not know how to receive being seen. She had, in her whole life, perhaps been seen in this way by three people, and two of them were dead, and one of them was Tobin.
Her face did not change. Her face did not have permission to change. But somewhere in her chest, in the region she had once heard her father describe as “softening below the glass,” something yielded, and she met Tobin’s eye across the trail, and she nodded to him, a very small nod, the nod of a woman acknowledging receipt of a gift she had not been prepared to receive, and Tobin nodded back, a very small nod also, the nod of a grandfather confirming that the gift had been given and would not be discussed further, and the transaction between them closed.
“Master Tobin,” she said, because she could not not say something, and her voice was in its ordinary low register and did not betray her. “Your posture behind the roan was admirably prompt.”
“Aye,” said Tobin, in his unhurried voice. “I’ve ducked behind horses before.”
“I am, increasingly, not surprised.”
He smiled, and she smiled, the very small fraction of a smile she had ever given anyone, and they went on.
The company spent the next fifteen minutes in the practical conclusion of the engagement. The fourth man and the blade were dragged, at Balthazar’s gruff suggestion, to a hollow some distance off the trail, where Ysolde laid them out with the rough decency that had been her habit since girlhood when dealing with the dead of any kind. Aldric spoke, briefly, the short ritual committal from his tome — a mundane passage, not magical, but the words scholars spoke over bodies they did not wish to leave entirely without ceremony — and the hollow was covered with branches and leaves such that no passing scavenger would immediately notice. Master Huberd’s crossbow and sword and short blade were added to the party’s gear. His money-belt was opened and its contents inventoried: a writ of credit drawn upon a northern house of commerce, a folded and sealed paper that Seraphine did not open at once but preserved for later examination, a ring with a cipher she now recognized as the device of the Silent Chapter, and a quantity of gold coin that she divided, without discussion, equally among the five of them. Master Huberd, his hands rebound at the looser knot Ysolde had specified, was given a waterskin and a share of bread and permitted to walk in the center of the remaining column as they resumed their westward travel.
They rode on, silent for the most part. Ysolde at the front did not sing for an hour, out of respect for the engagement and for the quality of listening required in the interval after. Aldric, at second place, composed silently. Balthazar muttered. Tobin ambled, and his kettle swayed on his back in the slow rhythm that matched the wood’s deeper rhythm. Seraphine, at the rear, rode with Master Huberd just ahead of her, and she watched him with the continuous peripheral watch of the professional who does not release a prisoner from her attention until the prisoner has been released in fact.
They released Master Huberd at the edge of the next stretch of forest, at a point where the trail opened into a short clearing and where the path forward became legible for some distance. Seraphine herself untied the loose knot at Master Huberd’s wrists. She stood very close to him as she did so, and she said, in a low voice only he would hear:
“You will tell your Brother Uriel everything I have instructed you to tell him. You will also tell him, privately, one more thing. You will tell him that the woman who spared you in the enchanted wood did so because she recognized, in you, a professional. You will tell him that the woman who spared you invites him to understand that she will not always be so careful in her recognition. You will tell him that he should not send men of the blade’s quality against her again, because men of the blade’s quality are, in her accounting, too valuable to be wasted in matters that can be resolved by conversation. Are these instructions clear?”
“They are clear,” said Master Huberd. He looked at her for a moment, and she saw, in his face, the curious small expression of a man who had, despite all expectation, come to feel a kind of professional regard for the woman who had just killed two of his colleagues. He added, quietly, “Madame, I do not know your name.”
“That is correct, Master Huberd. You do not.”
“May I know it?”
“No.”
“I understand.”
“Go in peace, Master Huberd. We will not meet again on this expedition.”
He walked away, on foot, along the back-trail, and they watched him go until he was out of sight, and then they turned and resumed their western course, and they did not speak of him for the rest of the afternoon.
Seraphine rode, at the rear, with her dagger-pin repinned at her chest, and she felt, in the region below the glass, the small regular pulse of what she had come to think of as her post-engagement breathing. She had experienced this breathing many times in her life, and she knew its shape, and she did not fight it. It was the body’s slow return from the heightened state of violence to the state of ordinary vigilance, and it took, in her experience, approximately an hour, during which her limbs would feel lighter than usual and her hearing would be sharper than usual and she would be more likely than usual to be moved by small things — a shaft of sunlight through the canopy, a particular note of birdsong, the line of Ysolde’s back as she rode ahead — to an interior warmth she did not normally permit herself. She permitted it now, for the hour. She rode with Tobin’s sorrow still in her chest, and with the blade’s face still in the inner catalog of her memory, and with the small cold-silver gratification of a job efficiently done, and with the single regret for the blade’s teacher’s teaching, and with the larger and quieter knowledge that her party had just survived its first real test and had survived it without losing any of its members, and that she had been the instrument of the surviving, and that the instrument had not cracked in the operation, and that the instrument remained, at her hip as it were, available for use in the further tests that were surely coming.
The wood closed around them again. The canopy resumed its five layers. The silver-wire bird, somewhere far above, sang one slow descending phrase that Ysolde, at the head of the column, did not answer, and Seraphine took the absence of the answer to be a sign that Ysolde had judged — correctly — that the engagement of ten minutes past had been acknowledged by the wood in its own way, and that further conversation with the silver-wire bird would be a presumption too much for the hour.
They rode on in silence. They rode on. The afternoon darkened toward its evening, and the wood’s green grew its particular loch-deep color once more, and Seraphine sat straight in Andromache’s saddle and composed, in her mind, the report she would make to the party at tonight’s fire. The report would contain the new intelligence from Master Huberd. The report would contain her analysis of the Silent Chapter of the Lattice. The report would contain her estimate of the heightened danger of the return journey should they perform the ritual as the Guild had designed it. The report would not contain the moment in which Tobin had seen her, and she had been seen, and had received the seeing as a gift she had not known how to accept; that moment belonged to her alone, and to Tobin, and she would carry it privately in the interior chamber where such things were kept, in the space beneath the glass.
She rode on. The wood breathed. The evening came. Her dagger-pin lay warm against her chest. Somewhere behind them, Master Huberd walked toward the distant report he would give. Somewhere ahead of them, the Vale waited. The five of them, alive, competent, bloodied but unbroken, continued westward beneath the layered canopies of the inverted ocean, and Seraphine, at the rear, smiled the smallest smile she had, the smile for no one, and thought the words she had thought at the Four Winds on the first night of this business: This. This is the work.
Segment 10: A Parable Told Over Hard Biscuits
Now, friend, I will set it down plain, because a man my age does not dress up his memory with ribbons, particularly when the memory is not his own property but is being lent out for the use of others who may need it. That evening, after the business on the trail with the three thieves and the one runaway, and after Seraphine had done the clean small dreadful work that her hands were shaped for, and after we had ridden the three miles through the wood to the edge of the wood-section where we let Master Huberd go walking back the way he had come with a fresh set of instructions and not quite enough water to make him comfortable but not so little as to make him a corpse, and after we had made camp in another of those old fire-ring hollows of which the wood seemed to have an inexhaustible supply — that evening, friend, was the evening when the four of them looked at me, each in their own manner, and said without saying it that they needed me to tell them a story.
You may wonder, friend, how four grown souls look at an old fool with a kettle and ask him for a story without opening their mouths. I will tell you. They do it in the particular way that fire-light permits. When people have come through something considerable, and they have eaten their bread and their hard biscuit and their small ration of dried sausage, and they have had their first cup of tea and are holding their second cup in both hands with the palms wrapped against the tin for warmth, and they are all sitting around a fire that is cracking soft and settled in its embers, and nobody has said anything for a span of maybe three or four minutes — that is the moment. In that moment, a party looks at its grandfather. It doesn’t matter if the grandfather is actually the oldest soul at the fire, though in our case I was and by some considerable margin, though I will not be drawn into specifying the margin. The grandfather is the one everybody looks at when the silence has settled and nobody has anything left to say and everybody still needs something to be said.
I had known it would come to me that evening. I had been expecting it since about four in the afternoon, when I had watched Seraphine kill two men in five seconds without flinching and had seen the small careful way she had set her own face not to change afterward, and when I had caught her eye across the trail and had let her see me see her. I had known, in that moment, that the party had taken its first real hit of the journey — not a hit of body, because nobody had been hurt, but a hit of soul, which is a different and harder kind — and that the younger members would come to me that evening and would want perspective, though none of them would put it in those words, because people do not, in general, ask for perspective in the particular terms of asking for it; they ask for it by looking at you across a fire and going quiet.
I took another sip of tea. I was in no hurry. An old man should never be in a hurry to tell a story, because the hurry is half the gift. A story properly told arrives in its own time, and the space between the looking-at and the telling is part of the tale. I let the space grow. I saw Aldric close his tome very quietly and set it beside him. I saw Ysolde adjust her seating on her log. I saw Balthazar, who had been muttering since we made camp, go silent. I saw Seraphine — Seraphine, who by all the evidence should have been the most composed among us, and who in fact was, but who was composed the way a kettle is composed when it has just come off a hot hob and is still ticking — I saw Seraphine lean back the smallest fraction against the log behind her, which was, in the Seraphine-dialect, the equivalent of settling in for a long hearing.
I took one more sip. I set my cup down. I said, in the voice I use for these occasions, which is a little slower and a little lower than my ordinary voice, and which my wife used to call my “fireside voice” back when she was still around to tease me about it:
“Did I ever tell you the one about the goat, the king, and the borrowed hat?”
Nobody had heard it. Nobody, as it happens, had heard it because I had not told it in approximately forty-three years, since the last time I had told it, which was at a different fire in a different country to a different party of younger souls after a different bad afternoon, and the circumstances of that telling are not germane to the present one and I will not go into them. But the story itself had been with me all those forty-three years, tucked away in the pocket where a grandfather keeps such things, and I had been turning it over in my mind since about sundown, and I had decided it was the one.
Ysolde said, “I don’t think you have, Tobin.”
“Well,” I said, “that is a gap in your education I can remedy in about twenty minutes, give or take, depending on how often you interrupt me.”
“I’ll try not to,” she said, and she smiled the smile of a woman who was grateful to have something to smile about, and Aldric made a small amused sound through his nose, and Balthazar grunted, and Seraphine did not smile, but Seraphine did something better than smile — Seraphine turned her face toward me with the attention of a woman settling in for a proper story, and gave me, if I may say, permission to proceed.
“Right, then,” I said. “Once upon a time — and I will note, friend, that every tale my grandmother ever told began with once upon a time, and my grandmother was a liar of the first order, and this is nonetheless how the tale commences, which I offer not as a defense but as a warning — once upon a time, in a country I will not name, because the naming would require me to remember which name of that country was current at which time, there lived a goat.”
“A goat,” said Balthazar, in the muttering voice.
“A goat,” I said. “Now, this goat was not an ordinary goat, though in all outward particulars she was as ordinary as goats come. She was brown with a white patch on her rump and a beard that needed trimming and a disposition roughly equivalent to that of a customs inspector who has missed his breakfast. She ate thistles and shoe leather and any ribbon she could reach, and she head-butted small children who did not move out of her way fast enough, and she gave good milk, which is the only reason her owners — a husband and wife named, as I recall, Goody and Goodman Periwinkle, though I may be misremembering the names and it may have been Goody and Goodman Winterbottom, but the name does not much affect the story — the only reason the Periwinkles had not long since traded her away for a more even-tempered goat was that she gave good milk, and the husband’s mother, who lived with them, had a particular fondness for the cheese the wife made from the goat’s milk, and the husband was the kind of husband who arranged his domestic life so as not to disappoint his mother, which is a kind of husband I have met before and will meet again, and no great admiration for, but no great condemnation either.”
Ysolde laughed. It was the first laugh of the evening, and it was the right size of laugh — not the too-loud laugh that she used when she was frightened, but the ordinary-sized laugh that meant she was easing, which was what I had been working for.
“Now,” I said, “the goat had a name. The goat’s name was Millicent. I remember this because it was an unusual name for a goat, and I asked my grandmother when she first told me the story whether the name was right, and my grandmother fixed me with the look that meant I was about to be told off for interrupting, and she said, ‘Tobin, if I say the goat’s name was Millicent, then the goat’s name was Millicent, and if you interrupt me again I will tell the rest of this story to the cat.’ So the goat’s name was Millicent, and you are not to question the point.”
“I’m not going to question the point,” said Ysolde, still laughing.
“Good,” I said. “Because you’ve got no right to. Now, in the same country where Millicent lived, there was a king. This king was a perfectly ordinary king, which is to say, he was a vain man of middle age whose principal qualifications for his position were that his father had held it before him and that his neck was strong enough to support the crown. He was not a cruel king and he was not a particularly kind king; he was a king the way most kings are kings, which is to say, he was pleasant to his courtiers when he was being watched and moody to his servants when he was not, and he had a wife he had long stopped listening to and three children who had long stopped listening to him, and he spent his afternoons hunting and his evenings drinking and his mornings regretting both. This is a type of man well represented in the historical record, and if I were a more refined storyteller I would give him distinguishing features, but I am not a more refined storyteller and I will not.”
“No distinguishing features at all?” said Aldric.
“One,” I said. “He had an unreasonable attachment to his hat.”
“Ah,” said Aldric.
“The hat was not the crown,” I said. “The crown was a separate object, which he wore at council meetings and at public appearances, and which was gold and heavy and hurt his ears after about two hours. The hat was an ordinary hat. It was a broad-brimmed felt hat of a kind a farmer might wear, lined with a silk of a particular green that the king liked, and it had belonged to the king’s father, and the king wore it when he went hunting, and he wore it when he went riding, and he wore it when he went walking in his gardens, and he wore it, essentially, whenever he was not required by ceremony to be wearing the crown. The hat was precious to him. It was precious to him for the reason that most precious things are precious to most people, which is that it had belonged to his father and he had loved his father and he missed his father, though he did not say this aloud, being the kind of king he was, and he said instead that the hat was comfortable and suited him and matched his coloring.”
“That tracks,” muttered Balthazar. “Balthazar has met that kind of king. Balthazar has sailed for that kind of king. Balthazar will never sail for that kind of king again if Balthazar can help it.”
“A sensible policy,” I said. “Now. One afternoon, the king, who had been out hunting, stopped at a small farmstead to water his horse. This was a thing kings did in that country and that era; the country was small and the king was minor and the pretension of protocol that would have required him to travel with a larger retinue was not yet in fashion, and so the king was alone, or rather with one attendant, and the attendant was watering the horses at the trough while the king himself was stretching his legs in the yard. The farmstead belonged, as luck or fate or my grandmother’s preference for symmetry would have it, to the Periwinkles. And Millicent the goat, who had been tied up in the yard that afternoon because Goody Periwinkle had been churning butter and did not want the goat in the kitchen, was at that moment in one of her ordinary foul tempers, because the rope tying her to the post was the same rope that had been tying her to the post for three weeks and she was tired of it.”
“Uh oh,” said Ysolde.
“Uh oh indeed,” I said. “The king, wishing to admire the famous goat-cheese-producing goat, whose reputation had reached him through channels that I do not propose to explain because my grandmother never explained them either, approached Millicent with the slow inquisitive approach of a man who had no experience of goats and who believed, wrongly, that goats were small and tractable creatures of no particular danger. He stood before Millicent at a distance of approximately four feet, which was approximately one foot within the range of Millicent’s tether, which the king had not calculated, being no surveyor. He bent down to inspect the goat’s face more closely. The goat, from her side of the encounter, observed a large well-dressed creature bending toward her with a broad-brimmed green-lined hat on its head, and the hat was exactly at goat’s-reach height, and Millicent was Millicent, and the thing that followed was the thing that follows whenever a goat of Millicent’s disposition encounters a hat at goat’s-reach height.”
“She ate it,” said Ysolde, delighted.
“She took it,” I said. “She did not eat it immediately. She took it off the king’s head with the particular quick darting gesture by which a goat separates any object from any surface, and she retreated to the full length of her tether, and she stood there, holding the king’s hat in her teeth, and she chewed the brim meditatively, the way Millicents do, and she regarded the king with the cold yellow judgment of which goats are the undisputed masters in the animal kingdom.”
“What did the king do?” said Aldric.
“The king,” I said, “did several things in rapid succession, none of which served him well. First, he shouted. This was a mistake, because the only result of shouting at a goat is that the goat chews faster. Second, he lunged for the hat, which was also a mistake, because goats are quicker than men who drink too much wine on their hunting afternoons, and Millicent simply moved her head three inches to the left and the king missed and fell over. Third, the king, who was now on the ground in the Periwinkle yard with his hat being chewed by a goat, called for his attendant, and his attendant came running, but the attendant was an older man of considerable practical wisdom, and the attendant took one look at the situation — the king on the ground, the goat with the hat, the butter-churning Goody Periwinkle just now emerging from the kitchen with her hands still floury — and the attendant did the wisest thing any courtier has ever done in any kingdom, which was to pretend he had not yet arrived and to step back around the corner of the cottage and to take several slow breaths there before re-approaching, giving the king time to get up off the ground on his own power.”
Ysolde was laughing steadily now, and Aldric was doing the quiet shoulder-shaking that is his version of laughter, and Balthazar was making the chest-cough sound that indicates his equivalent of a standing ovation, and even Seraphine, I noted, had permitted her mouth to turn up at one corner in the small amused expression she allowed herself in the presence of a well-told absurdity. I was gratified. I was not yet doing the work of the story, mind you — I was still laying its foundation. But the foundation was holding, and I could tell I would be able to build on it.
“Now,” I said, “Goody Periwinkle, who was a practical woman, came out into the yard, saw the king on the ground and the goat with the hat, correctly identified the king as a king — the king was dressed well enough that there was no confusion about this — and did the correct practical thing, which was to apologize profusely, to invite the king into the cottage for a cup of something restorative, and to promise faithfully that the hat would be recovered from Millicent and returned to him before he rode out.”
“Was it?” said Ysolde.
“It was not,” I said. “Or rather, it was, but not in the condition in which it had been taken. Millicent had, in the twenty minutes it took Goody Periwinkle to untie her and separate her from her prize, consumed approximately half the brim of the hat. The silk lining had been reduced to a wet green pulp. The crown of the hat, where the felt was heaviest, had survived more or less intact, though it was now oval rather than round, owing to goat-teeth impressions. The hatband, which had been a simple ribbon of a similar green silk, had been entirely ingested. The hat, in short, was a ruin. And the king, who had been drinking the restorative cup in the cottage with the intention of being gracious about the small rural mishap, now saw the hat, and the restorative cup did not help him, and the king’s face went through a series of colors that my grandmother used to enumerate with such relish that I could not possibly do justice to the enumeration at this fire on this evening, and will therefore not attempt. I will only say that by the time the king’s face settled on the color it was going to stay on, Goody Periwinkle had gone white, and the Goodman Periwinkle, who had come in from the fields for his lunch, had gone the color of chalk, and the attendant had executed a second tactical retreat around the corner of the cottage, and Millicent had been tied up again and was, I am sorry to report, looking quite pleased with herself.”
“What happened?” said Ysolde. “Did he have the goat killed?”
“He did not,” I said. “He considered it, by all accounts. He considered it for some minutes. But the Periwinkles had been shrewd enough to place Millicent immediately behind Goody’s own person, so that killing the goat would have required going through Goody, and the king, for all his vanities, was not the kind of king who killed women in their own kitchens over ruined hats. He was, to his credit, better than that. So he did not have the goat killed. He did the other thing a king of his type does when an injury has been suffered that cannot be avenged by ordinary means. He demanded a fine.”
“How much of a fine?” said Aldric.
“Five hundred gold pieces,” I said. “Which was, at that time, in that country, approximately three years of the Periwinkles’ entire income from all sources, including the sale of Millicent’s cheese. The Periwinkles did not have five hundred gold pieces. The Periwinkles had approximately eleven silver pieces in an earthenware jar under the hearth, and a cow, and seven chickens, and Millicent, and the farmstead itself, and that was the sum of their worldly wealth. The king, being unfamiliar with the economics of small farmsteads and not in a mood to inquire, set the fine and departed, with the ruined hat carried by the attendant, and with the instruction that the fine be paid to the royal treasury within thirty days or the farmstead would be seized in settlement.”
“That’s not fair,” said Ysolde.
“It is not,” I said. “It was a judgment issued by a humiliated man with more authority than wisdom. Such judgments are the most common kind of judgment in any realm, in my experience, and the historical record will support me in this if you care to check. But the Periwinkles, having been issued the judgment, now had thirty days to produce five hundred gold pieces or lose their home.”
“What did they do?” said Ysolde.
“Well,” I said, “they did what people in such circumstances always do. They panicked for about a day, and then they sat down at their kitchen table, and they tried to think. And thinking, at a kitchen table, in the state they were in, did not produce immediate results. They considered selling Millicent, but Millicent at market would fetch perhaps two gold pieces, which was one-two-hundred-and-fiftieth of the sum required. They considered selling the cow, which would fetch maybe fifteen, which was one-thirty-third of the sum required. They considered selling the farmstead itself, but the farmstead was what they were trying to keep, and if they sold it they would have no farmstead and still owe most of the fine, because farmsteads of their quality did not fetch five hundred gold pieces at market either. They considered fleeing the country, but they had a grandmother living with them who was too old to flee, and they had nowhere to flee to, and fleeing did not appeal to them. They considered, briefly and in an ashamed manner which they never afterward admitted to one another, robbing a traveler on the road, but they were not people who robbed travelers, and even in their panic they knew they could not become such people overnight. They ran out of ideas after perhaps four hours of kitchen-table thinking, and they sat with their ideas running out, and they stared at each other, and after a long while Goody Periwinkle said to Goodman Periwinkle, ‘We have to go to the Widow.’”
“The Widow?” said Ysolde.
“There was in that parish,” I said, “an old woman whom everybody called the Widow, though she was no more a widow than you or I. She was called the Widow because her husband had died some forty years before, and the parish had gotten in the habit of referring to her by the condition of his death, and the habit had outlasted any reasonable memory of her original marriage. The Widow was very old. She was reputed to be the oldest soul in the parish, though nobody knew for certain, and she lived alone in a small stone house at the edge of the village, and she kept cats, and she did not often come into the village except on market day, and on market day she bought very little and was not much spoken to, because people were shy of her. They were shy of her because the Widow had a reputation. Not for witchcraft, mind you. The Widow was not a witch, and the parish had not accused her of being one, because the parish was not foolish enough to accuse the people who knew things of being witches. The Widow’s reputation was that if you went to her with a problem that you could not solve by ordinary means, she would, in exchange for a small favor to be named later, tell you a story that had nothing to do with your problem, and by the time the story was done you would know what to do about your problem.”
“Ah,” said Aldric, softly.
“Ah indeed,” I said. “So the Periwinkles went to the Widow.”
“On foot?” said Ysolde.
“On foot, the afternoon of the second day after the king’s judgment. They brought with them, as was the custom, a small offering — in their case, a pot of the goat-cheese, which was all they had of any value that was portable. They arrived at the Widow’s cottage at about the middle of the afternoon. They knocked. She opened the door. She looked at them. She accepted the cheese. She sat them down at her table in her kitchen, which was very small, and she served them tea in cups that did not match, and she listened to them tell the whole story, from Millicent’s first taking of the hat through the king’s demand through their four hours of kitchen-table thinking, and she listened without interrupting, and at the end of their telling she took a long drink of her own tea and she set the cup down and she said, ‘I am going to tell you the story of the bucket and the well.’”
“Of course she was,” said Aldric, who had caught the structure.
“Don’t spoil it,” said Ysolde.
“The story of the bucket and the well,” I said, “as the Widow told it, went as follows. There was once a village at the bottom of a mountain, and the only water in the village came from a single well at the village square, and the well was deep, and it was reached by a bucket on a long rope. The bucket had been used by the villagers for many generations, and everyone in the village drew water from the same bucket, and the bucket was never idle, because from before dawn to after dusk somebody was always drawing water. One summer, the well began to run low. The villagers could tell it was running low because the bucket came up heavier with mud and lighter with water, and the water that came up tasted of iron more than it usually did. The village elders met to consider the problem. Some said the well must be dug deeper. Some said a new well must be dug. Some said there must be a drought and the village must ration. The meetings went on for a week. Nothing was decided. The bucket continued to come up heavier with mud and lighter with water.”
“And then?” said Ysolde.
“And then,” I said, “a small boy of the village, who was seven years old and had no standing in the elders’ meetings, walked to the well on a Tuesday afternoon, and he looked at the bucket, and he noticed that the rope had worn thin at a particular point about a third of the way down, and he noticed that the bucket, when it reached the waterline, was tilting to one side because the rope’s weakness was changing its balance, and he noticed that the tilting bucket was scooping up mud along with water because it was not dipping straight. The boy went home. The boy told his mother what he had noticed. The mother told the father. The father told the elders. The elders, after some discussion, replaced the rope. The new rope held the bucket straight. The bucket, when dipped straight, brought up clean water. The well, as it turned out, was not running dry at all. The well had been the same all summer. The bucket had been the problem. The rope had been the problem within the problem.”
“Huh,” said Ysolde.
“The Widow told this to the Periwinkles,” I said, “and the Periwinkles listened, and the Periwinkles did not immediately understand what the story of the bucket and the well had to do with their fine of five hundred gold pieces. And the Widow did not explain. That was not the Widow’s way. The Widow refilled their tea cups, and she said, ‘It is getting late. You should walk back before dark. Thank you for the cheese.’ And she showed them the door.”
“So they walked back,” said Ysolde.
“They walked back,” I said. “And for the first mile of the walking back, they did not speak. And for the second mile of the walking back, they argued, because Goody Periwinkle was angry that they had walked all that way for a story about a bucket, and Goodman Periwinkle was angry that Goody Periwinkle was angry, and they argued in the particular way that married couples argue when the argument is really about something else entirely. And for the third mile of the walking back, they stopped arguing and walked in silence, and the silence was one of those silences in which a thought is slowly growing in two people simultaneously. And about halfway through the third mile, Goody Periwinkle stopped walking, and she said, ‘The hat wasn’t the problem.’ And Goodman Periwinkle said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘The hat wasn’t the problem. The problem was the king’s pride. And we’ve been trying to think about how to pay the fine, but the fine isn’t the problem either. The problem is the king’s pride. If we can fix the king’s pride, we don’t have to pay the fine.’”
“Oh, I like where this is going,” said Ysolde.
“Good,” I said, “because this is where it goes. The Periwinkles went home. The Periwinkles sat up all night at the kitchen table, and they did not think about gold pieces or about selling the cow, and they thought about the king’s pride, which was the rope in the story of the bucket and the well. And by dawn they had a plan. And the plan was this. They would make the king a new hat.”
“Oh, bless,” said Ysolde.
“Not just any hat,” I said. “A better hat than the one Millicent had eaten. A hat that would allow the king to save face. A hat the king could wear in public and say, ‘Look at this magnificent hat. The hat my goat ate was a mere warm-up for this hat. I am glad the goat ate the old one, because it made room for the new one.’ A hat, in other words, that would turn the king’s humiliation into the king’s triumph, so that the king did not have to punish anyone to recover his dignity. The Periwinkles did not have the money to hire a hatter. The Periwinkles did not have the skills to make a hat themselves. The Periwinkles did not have the materials for a hat of the required quality. But the Periwinkles did have Millicent.”
“Wait,” said Ysolde. “Are they going to — ”
“They are going to use Millicent’s hair,” I said, “because Millicent, for all her foul temper, had an undercoat of the softest and silkiest goat-hair in the parish, and that undercoat could be combed out in spring by any patient hand, and if you combed enough goats you could produce, over time, enough soft hair to weave a very fine felt, and the Periwinkles had been combing Millicent for years and had about four pounds of Millicent’s undercoat stored in a sack in the loft, which they had been saving for no particular purpose other than that Goody Periwinkle did not like to throw useful things away.”
“Of course she didn’t,” said Ysolde.
“They took the hair to the old felter of the next village over,” I said, “who owed them a favor because the Goodman Periwinkle had once helped dig him out of a collapsed cart in a snowstorm, and they asked him to felt the hair into the finest felt he had ever made, and they told him it was for a very important hat, and they did not tell him who the hat was for, because he did not need to know. And the old felter did his best work, which was very good work, and he produced a felt of such softness and such subtle silvery shimmer that when you held it up to the light it seemed to have depth to it, like the surface of a still pond. And the Periwinkles took the felt to the parish seamstress, who had her own reasons to help them — because the Goody Periwinkle had nursed the seamstress’s mother through her last illness — and they asked the seamstress to cut and sew a hat, to the specifications of the old hat as best they could remember them, with a wider and more generous brim and a higher crown. And the seamstress did. And the lining they could not afford a silk for, but Goody Periwinkle had, in her cedar chest, a single square of green silk that had been in her family for three generations and which she had been keeping for her own burial shawl; and Goody Periwinkle took out that square of green silk, and she laid it on the kitchen table, and she looked at it for a long time, and she said aloud to her husband, ‘I am not going to be able to take this with me when I go, and we need it now.’ And the green silk became the lining.”
“Oh, Tobin,” said Ysolde. She had tears in her eyes. I had not expected them so soon. I had expected them later. But Ysolde’s tears arrive on their own schedule, and I was not going to tell them to wait.
“And on the twenty-ninth day of the thirty,” I said, “the Periwinkles traveled to the castle. They traveled on foot, because they had not the coin for a cart. They carried the new hat in a wooden box, wrapped in a piece of plain linen. They arrived at the castle gate. They asked, politely, for an audience with the king. They were refused. They asked again. They were refused. They asked a third time, and they told the guard at the gate, ‘We have brought the payment for the fine.’ And the guard at the gate looked at them, and he looked at the wooden box, and he sent a message inside, and eventually, after about four hours of waiting in the castle courtyard in the cold of late autumn, they were admitted to the king’s presence.”
“Just the two of them?” said Ysolde.
“Just the two of them, standing in the great hall in their second-best clothes, which were not very good clothes. And the king on his throne, bored, expecting to watch them beg for a reduction of the fine, expecting, I suspect, to enjoy their begging a little. And the Goodman Periwinkle stepped forward with the wooden box, and he set it down on the floor at a respectful distance, and he opened it, and he took out the hat, and he held it up in both hands so that the king could see it, and he said, ‘Your Majesty, we have come to present you with the payment for the fine. We have brought you a hat.’”
“And the king — ” said Ysolde.
“And the king,” I said, “who had been expecting gold pieces or at least the beginning of a negotiation about gold pieces, was caught entirely off balance. He stared at the hat. The courtiers stared at the hat. The court fell quiet. And the hat — friend, I have to tell you, the hat was beautiful. The old felter had felted a felt such as no one in that country had ever produced. The seamstress had cut a cut such as no one in that country had ever worn. The green silk lining was visible under the folded brim like the reflection of a pond at twilight. The hat did not look like a hat made by a poor farmer. The hat looked like a hat made for a king by the finest craftsmen of a great capital. And the king sat on his throne and looked at the hat, and he did not know what to say for several long seconds, and then he said the only thing a man like that king could say under the circumstances, which was — ”
I paused. I took a sip of tea. I let them wait. An old man earns his pauses. I had earned this one.
” — which was, ‘That hat is better than the one the goat ate.’”
“Oh,” said Ysolde, with enormous satisfaction.
“And the Goodman Periwinkle bowed, and he said, ‘Your Majesty, we hoped that it would be. We made it as a tribute to your Majesty’s excellent taste in hats. The hat the goat ate was, if Your Majesty will forgive us for saying so, the finest hat we had ever seen, and we were ashamed that our goat had harmed it. We wished to replace it with one worthy of Your Majesty’s head. We hope Your Majesty will accept it.’”
“Did he?” said Ysolde.
“He did. He took the hat. He put it on. It fit him perfectly, because Goody Periwinkle had been clever and had made small allowance for the fact that the ruined hat’s crown-impression would have distorted somewhat in the goat’s teeth, and she had rebuilt the internal shape to match what the old hat must originally have been. The king wore the new hat for the rest of the audience. The court admired it. The king’s three children admired it. The queen, who had long stopped listening to the king, now looked up and noticed he was wearing a new hat, and she admired it. And the king, feeling admired, which is the thing such a king most wishes to feel, felt his dignity restored, and felt, further, that he had been magnanimous in accepting the hat as payment, and he said, in the voice of a man who has discovered a grandeur in himself he did not know he possessed, ‘The fine is paid. The Periwinkles are dismissed with my blessing. And let it be recorded that goats are not to be approached on country farmsteads except by persons of proper experience.’”
“And they lived happily ever after,” said Ysolde, half-laughing and half-still-crying.
“They did,” I said. “Or they lived as happily ever after as anyone does in this life, which is to say, they lived some good days and some bad days, and they kept Millicent, who lived another five years and continued to be a foul-tempered goat to the end, and they told the story of the hat to their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, and the story eventually reached my grandmother, who told it to me, and I have told it to you, and that is how stories survive, friend — by being told to the right people at the right fire on the right evening.”
I stopped. I took another sip of tea. The tea had gone cold. I did not mind.
The four of them sat quietly for a minute or so. The fire cracked. An owl hooted somewhere up in the canopy. The kettle was empty. I reached for another of the hard biscuits from the bag at my side, and I broke it slowly, and I ate half of it, and I chewed it thoughtfully, because hard biscuits are designed to be chewed thoughtfully and there is no speeding up the process.
Aldric spoke first. “Tobin,” he said, in his careful scholar’s voice, “I am aware, as I suspect my companions are, that the story is about us.”
“Is it?” I said.
“The king is the Guild,” said Aldric.
“Is he?” I said.
“The hat is the artifact,” said Aldric. “Or rather the power. The thing the Guild has demanded.”
“Is it?”
“We are the Periwinkles,” said Ysolde, very quietly. “Or at least, we can be, if we choose to be.”
“Can you?”
“Tobin,” said Aldric, “with respect, will you stop answering our observations with questions?”
“I will in a moment,” I said. “But I want you to arrive at the bottom of it under your own power. Keep going.”
“The rope,” said Ysolde. “The rope was the real problem. In the Widow’s story. The problem wasn’t the well, it was the rope. For us, the problem isn’t the ritual. The problem is — ” and here she hesitated, because she had not quite found the word for it yet.
“The problem is the frame,” said Seraphine.
I turned my head to her. She had not spoken since the story started. I had hoped, without expecting it, that she would be the one to arrive at the key, and she had. I permitted myself a small private satisfaction.
“Go on, lass,” I said.
“The Guild has framed this as a ritual to be performed or not performed,” said Seraphine, in her low considered voice. “They have framed the choice as: perform it the Guild’s way, or defy the Guild. Aldric’s reading of the chapter tells us the Guild’s way is a rebinding that transfers the power to the Guild. The Silent Chapter of the Lattice has framed the choice as: let the Guild perform it, or intercept them and take the power for the Lattice. Both framings assume the power is an object to be acquired. Both framings assume the only question is who ends up holding the hat. But the question — ” and here she paused, and I saw her working it out in real time, and I did not interrupt, “the question may not be who holds the hat. The question may be what kind of hat we bring to the court.”
“Ah,” said Aldric.
“We do not have to perform the ritual as the Guild wrote it,” said Seraphine. “We do not have to perform the ritual as the Lattice would prefer. We could — ” and here she paused again, because the thing she was arriving at was large, “we could write a new ritual. A third ritual. One that does not transfer the power to any party. One that — addresses the underlying problem. The underlying problem, per Aldric’s reading, is that the original binding is aging. The power is stirring. That is the problem. The Guild’s solution is to rebind-and-transfer. The Lattice’s solution is to rebind-and-transfer-to-us. But there could be other solutions. There could be rebind-and-do-not-transfer. There could be release-and-negotiate. There could be — things I have not yet thought of. The Guild and the Lattice have constrained the possibility space by presenting their framings. We do not have to accept their framings.”
“We can bring a better hat,” said Ysolde.
“We can bring a better hat,” said Seraphine, with something almost like a smile.
Balthazar, who had been muttering softly during all of this in the cadence that I had come to recognize as his analytic mutter, now cleared his throat, and the muttering stopped, and he spoke in his honest harbor voice. “Balthazar wants it known,” he said, “that Balthazar has been saying for three days that the ritual should not be performed as written. Balthazar would like it noted that Balthazar was right. Balthazar would further like it known that Balthazar has an opinion about what the better hat might look like, and Balthazar will share this opinion when we are closer to the ruins, because Balthazar does not want to commit to a design when Balthazar does not yet know the cut of the felt, if you will pardon Balthazar extending Tobin’s metaphor.”
“Balthazar extending a metaphor is a thing I will cherish in my old age,” said Ysolde, and she laughed the good laugh, and Balthazar harrumphed, and I saw the small pleased crinkle at the corner of his eye that meant he was secretly flattered.
Aldric said, “Tobin. There is one thing I want to ask. The Widow in your story. The old woman at the edge of the village who told the story of the bucket and the well. Is the Widow — are you the Widow?”
I looked at him. I have told you, friend, that Aldric of the Veil has, in the specific manner of scholars, occasional moments of sudden and unexpected shrewdness. This was one. He had caught the mirror. He had understood that the Widow in my story was, in the structure of the telling, the function I was currently performing for the party, and he had asked me whether I was taking the role on purpose.
I thought about how to answer him. I thought about it for perhaps four seconds.
“Son,” I said, “the Widow in the story is a role. Anyone at a fire can play it, given the right hour and the right need and the right listeners. Tonight it happened to be me. Tomorrow it might be Ysolde. The week after it might be you, if you can unbend enough from your scholarship to tell a story without citations. The point of the Widow is not that she is a particular person. The point of the Widow is that when a party is stuck in the wrong frame, somebody at the fire tells them a story about something that seems completely unrelated, and the story gives them the angle of approach they need. I am happy to play the Widow tonight because somebody had to, and I know more stories than the rest of you, which is an advantage of age that I will accept without apology. But no, I am not permanently the Widow. I am Tobin. And Tobin — ” and here I took a long breath, because this was the thing I had known since Seraphine killed the two men on the trail that I was going to have to say before the evening was out, and which I had not quite been willing to say until the story had done its work, “— Tobin is going to be honest with you about one more thing tonight, and then Tobin is going to bed, because Tobin is tired, and Tobin has had a long day.”
“Go on,” said Ysolde, gently.
“I’m not as old as I look,” I said. “I mean, I am as old as I look, in one sense. I look like an ambling grandfather in his seventies. I am older than that. I am considerably older than that. I am not going to tell you how much older than that, tonight, because it is not the right evening, and some of you are too tired to process it correctly, and the Widow does not dump her whole pack on one visit. But I am going to tell you that this is not the first time I have been in a party of five souls walking toward a binding ritual in the ruins of a forgotten civilization. I have done this before. I have done it twice before, to be precise. The first time I did it, I was a member of a party that did what the Guild of its era wanted done. The second time I did it, I was a member of a party that did not. I will not tell you tonight which of those two outcomes was better, because the answer is more complicated than yes or no, and you need to arrive at your own answer rather than inherit mine. But I will tell you that I have opinions, when the time comes for opinions, and that I have been holding those opinions in reserve, and that I will share them with the party at the appropriate hour, which is not tonight.”
Nobody spoke. I could see them working through what I had said. I could see Seraphine filing it away with the particular efficient cataloguing of her mind. I could see Aldric adjusting the frame of his previous understanding of me, which had been only partially correct, into a larger frame which was now almost but not quite correct. I could see Balthazar not being surprised, which was the reaction I had expected, because Balthazar had been assessing me from the first evening at the Copper Kettle and had concluded some days ago that there was more to me than met the eye. I could see Ysolde looking at me with a mixture of sorrow and affection that made me have to look briefly at the fire instead of at her, because Ysolde’s direct gaze is a thing a man has to be ready for.
“All right, Tobin,” said Ysolde, at length. “We hear you. We’re not going to ask more tonight. You tell us when you’re ready.”
“Thank you, lass,” I said.
“But,” she said, “one question. And you can answer it or not.”
“Go on.”
“Do you want to tell us? Eventually?”
I thought about it. I thought about it for longer than I usually think about such questions, because the question deserved it, and because Ysolde had asked it in her open-hearted way, and because I had not been asked such a question by a member of a party in about thirty years, and because the answer was not the answer I would have given the last time somebody asked.
“Aye, lass,” I said. “I think I do. When we’re further along, and when we know each other better, and when I’ve worked out which parts to tell and which parts to keep. Aye. I do want to tell you. Eventually.”
She nodded. She didn’t push further. Ysolde knows when not to push. It is one of her finest qualities, though she does not recognize it as a quality in herself, because she takes it for granted, and people never recognize their finest qualities, because they take them for granted.
I finished my biscuit. I finished what remained of my cold tea. I set the cup down. I stood up slowly, the way old men stand up after sitting too long on a log, and I did not pretend to stand up more easily than I actually stood up, because performing youth at an old body’s expense is undignified and I have never been willing to do it.
“I’m for bed,” I said. “You lot do what you like. If you want to talk more about hats and ropes and rebindings, you can do it without me. I won’t take offense. And if you want to sit quiet and let the fire burn down to itself, that’s a fine choice too. Either way, sleep when you can. Morning comes on its own schedule and not on ours.”
I crossed to my bedroll. I lay down. I pulled my blanket up. I lay there on my back with my eyes open for a moment, looking up through the gap in the canopy above our hollow at the strange Saṃsāran stars, and I thought about the Periwinkles and about Millicent and about the felter and the seamstress and the green silk that had been meant for a burial shawl, and I thought about the two previous parties I had been in who had walked toward two previous binding-rituals, and I thought about the four souls around my fire tonight, whom I loved more than I had any business loving four people I had known for less than two weeks, and I thought about the long considerable road still ahead of us, and I thought — because an old man is permitted these grand thoughts on occasion and will not apologize for them — I thought that if the gods were kind, if the slow patient amused Gaialilith who had put me on this world and in this party was feeling merciful, then this third time might be the one where the Widow’s story reached the Periwinkles in time for them to find their rope, and the rope might turn out to be a better rope than any rope yet invented, and the bucket might come up clean, and the well might turn out never to have been the problem at all.
I heard, from the fire, the four of them talking in low voices. I did not listen to what they were saying. It was not, any longer, for my ears. They were a party now, discussing their party business among themselves, and the grandfather had told his story, and the grandfather’s work for the evening was done, and the party would take it from here.
I rolled over. I closed my eyes. I fell asleep, surprisingly fast, with a small satisfied grin on my face that I would never in waking life have permitted anyone to see, and I slept, for the first time since entering the enchanted wood, the deep untroubled sleep of a man who has told a story to the right people at the right fire on the right evening, and has watched the story do exactly the work it was meant to do, and has been seen in the telling by four souls who would not, from this evening forward, ever again mistake him for an ordinary grandfather with an ordinary kettle, and who would love him the better for the not-mistaking.
And somewhere, I swear to you, friend, in some corner of the multiverse, the ghost of my grandmother nodded once in approval, and went back to whatever she was doing, which was probably arguing with another dead person about the correct name of a goat.
Segment 11: The Hidden Grove of the Local Mage
Now herken, gentils, and attend me well, For of a meetyng grave I have to tell, Which fell upon us on a wooded day Some distance yet from where the Vale doth lay, When we had come through many miles of green, And had sustaine such passings as were seen In chapters prior writ — the watching mile, The welcoming of trees, the masquer’s guile At Four Winds Inn, the ambush on the trail, And lastly Tobin’s tale of bucket’s pail And goat and hat and Periwinkles three — Each tale a knot in our knit tapestry Of fellowshyp and knowing. On the morn That followeth the Widow-tale, forlorn We rose, but rose together, which is half The cure for any morning. Tobin’s laugh Came easier, thogh somewhat grayer-tempered, For a man who telleth much is long encumbered The next day by what he did not tell Beneath the telling. So it was. We fell To saddles, and we took again our way, And rode beneath the canopy of day, Which had by now begun, I mark, to thin.
This I will pause and say: the wood did spin About us with a lessening of its thickness These forty-seven hours past. The swiftness Of the change was not abrupt, but slow and sure. The five great canopies that Balthazar’s pure Meditative melancholy had numbered At seven fathoms each, were now encumbered By fewer leaves, by gappier weavings. Light Came doune in broader shafts. The green-held night That Balthazar had called the inverted sea Was now but the inverted estuary, Wherein the salt-sweet mingle of tree and sky Announced the wood’s approach of its dry Western edge. We were, by evidence of the map I carried folded in my inner wrap, Some sixty leagues within the wood, and just Perhaps one day of riding from the trust- Worthy bound of its thinnest western skirt, Beyond which, by Ysolde’s maps and our own writ Of reconnaissance, there lay the Vale itself. But between the wood’s thinning and that shelf Of barren land, there dwelt, by the Clerk’s report, A certain mage, in certain grove, of sort Reclusive, who might give us counsel good Before our steps descended from the wood Into the vale of silence. This was the mage The Clerk had named. I carried in my sage Pilgrim’s tome a description, taken down From my own careful audience that morn At the High Hall, which ran as follows: “Mage Of some considerable unsung age, Who dwelleth in a grove one half-day’s walk Off from the westering road, where thickets balk The casual approach. A man who knoweth The Vale as few yet living know it. Oweth No loyalty to the Guild, but is not hostile. Beareth himself in manner most apostle- Like, though of no apostolic office.” Thus ran the Clerk’s quite careful office Of description. I had copied it with care, And now unfolded it in our wooded air, And read it to the party, so that all Of us might know what manner of portal We approached.
We turned off the main trail Some three hours after the midday’s pale Repast, at a mark which my map indicated By a small drawn willow, stylized and abbreviated, Which marked the head of the half-day’s footpath. The horses we tethered at a wide-hand swath Of clear ground, and left Ysolde’s field kit And some provender for them, and a writ That we would return by nightfall of the next Day, or else that passing travelers be vext To loose them and let them find their own way home. This last we did not expect; we left the tome Of writ for the horses as a courtesy, Not as a practical. Ysolde would have been Unable to leave the horses without a prayer Or a provision, and I would not be the one To ask her to forego either. Having done The tethering and the writing, we took foot, And with our lighter packs, and with the put- Ting of our boots upon softer ground, we walked Into the westward thickets.
I shal not balk At the description of the walking. The half-day’s Walk was a true half day. It was not the graceful mare’s Progress of our mounted riding, but the harder Human treading, up and doune, through garnered Stands of bramble, across the black-earthed streams Of the wood’s several small rivulets, past the seams Where one kind of tree yielded to another, past Old fallen giants lying softened at last Into mossy slow-decaying logs that pushed us Out of our way, past the small-blooming thrush- Haunted thickets of white-flowered elder, Past an aged and still-bearing wild apple bolder Than any we had seen in the ordinary wood. At this tree Ysolde paused, and for the good Of the party gathered three apples, which she Put carefully in her pouch, as a courtesy Gift for the mage, in case a courtesy gift Were to be needful, which in our experience shift- Ed in and out of need unpredictably.
This was, as I came to see eventually, A small but telling act. Ysolde had been carrying Apples for the mage from three hours previous to his tarrying, Which means Ysolde had been anticipating Every step of the meeting and rating Our preparedness against her own country-standard Of what a woodland visitor ought to have gar- Nished herself with. I love Ysolde for this. I say so Again, having said so before, because it is so.
At the three-quarter mark of the half-day’s walk, Just as the afternoon light was beginning to balk At reaching the forest floor in any quantity, We came to what was certainly the grove. I say certainty Because the grove announceth itself. A grove Of a reclusive mage is not an ordinary trove Of trees; it is a deliberate circumscription Of space, and a man with any minor inscription Of magical learning will know it from a furlong off. The grove announced itself by the simple proof Of its canopy, which did not weave into the canopy Of the surrounding wood at the edges, as any Ordinary grove would have done, but stopped short At a clean boundary, as if a tailor of some sort Had cut the grove’s trees to a pattern and sewn Its outermost leaves to its outermost branches alone, Leaving a hand’s breadth of visible sky between The grove’s top and the canopy of the surrounding green. This is a thing I had read of in certain monographs But had never before seen in life. It telegraphs A mage of considerable skill, who has coerced The trees of the grove to grow as he has nursed, And has persuaded the surrounding wood to keep Its own side of the line. Not a small or cheap Accomplishment. I marked it. I kept marking it.
Within the grove’s circumscribed air we fit Five souls and their footpacks with comfortable space. The grove was perhaps thirty yards across the face Of its roughly circular plan, and at its heart Stood a cottage of a kind that struck me in part As charming and in part as alarming, because The cottage was built of stone, but the stone was Not quarried; the cottage appeared to have grown Up out of the forest floor as a single gown Of rock, as though a mason-god of no ordinary Practice had poured liquid granite into an ivory- Colored mold and allowed it to set in the shape Of a dwelling. No mortar lines. No seams. The drape Of a low thatched roof over the top, thatched indeed With the ordinary reeds of the countryside’s need, But the walls and the chimney and the hearth below All of one unbroken piece, gray-white, with a slow Iridescence in certain places where the sunlight Struck. A building made by magic, not by the spright Hand of any mason’s chisel. I had seen such once, In a museum-chapel of the fifth province, once, And I had been told the art was lost these two centuries. It was not lost. It lived here, in the interstices Of an enchanted wood, in the making of a private Cottage for a man who did not wish to tolerate The limitations of ordinary masonry.
We stood at the grove’s edge. None of us moved toward the shy Small cottage at the center, because none of us had yet Been invited. An invitation is a courtesy one must get In these matters. One does not march into a mage’s grove And knock upon his door as if one were approaching a cove Of honest fishermen. One pauses at the threshold. One waits. One announces oneself, gently, and is told Whether one may enter. We paused. We waited.
At length, the door of the cottage, which had been plated With a single slab of that same grown-granite, opened From within, and a figure emerged, and my whole Aldric-person Beheld him for the first time, and I will set him doune For thee, reader, in the most careful scholar’s frown Of description that I can muster.
He was a man of fewer years than I had expected, Perhaps five and forty, though the trick of it, connected To something in his eyes, made the years hard to pin. His face was sharp at the cheekbones, clean-shaven on the chin, His hair a dark iron gray pulled back in a queue, His skin sun-touched, his frame lean but sinew- Strong, his hands long-fingered and faintly ink-stained At the knuckles, which marked him as one who had maintained A scholar’s habit alongside his magical practice. He wore a plain gray robe of no particular practice Of cut, girdled at the waist with a leathern cord, And on his feet a pair of rope-soled sandals of the sort One would wear in a garden. No staff. No amulet Visible at the throat. No rings upon the net Of his fingers. He carried nothing in his hands. He did not look surprised to see us. He had, I think, the plans Of the mind of one who has been watching the approach Of his visitors through some means he saw no reproach In keeping private from them.
He spoke. His voice was quiet, and surprisingly low For a man of his frame, and it had the faint pull of a slow Southern province’s inflection, though he had pruned The regional marks with a scholar’s care. He crooned Not; he spoke plainly, with the deliberate cadence Of a man who chooses every word against a balance Of possible meanings. He said:
“I had expected four. I see five. I am glad of the surplus. Come in. The tea is on, though it has been on for some purpose Uncertain amount of time, and may have gone past The ideal drinking-hour. I do not concern myself with the cast Of tea, particularly. If it is acceptable to your tongues, You may drink. If not, there is water. Come in, my young Friends.” And here he paused, and looked at Tobin with the smallest Adjustment of the head, and added, “And you, my oldest Friend. I had not expected you. You, at least, I had not.”
Tobin inclined his head. Tobin’s face did not Register surprise at this address, and Tobin’s face did not Register un-surprise either; Tobin’s face maintained the plot Of its habitual grandfatherly composure, with the small crinkle At the corner of the eye that marks, in Tobin, the wrinkle Of an internal adjustment made without comment. “Hello, Pell,” Said Tobin. “It has been a while.”
“It has,” said the mage, whose name, apparently, was Pell. “A great while. Come in and drink what may or may not be tea.”
And thus, my gentils, at the very threshold of the cottage, we Were instructed without further ceremony that Tobin and The mage were acquainted, had once been acquainted, and Were renewing an acquaintance of some considerable span. Tobin did not explain. Tobin has a gift for not explaining. The man Pell likewise did not explain, though he gave Tobin a small nod Of the kind that is exchanged between two persons who have trod Certain roads together and do not need to discuss the roads In the presence of a third audience. The party carried its loads Of packs into the cottage. I carried my tome carefully. Seraphine Carried her poise. Balthazar carried his mutter, now glean- Ed of its sharper edges, since Balthazar, to his credit, had read The room immediately upon entering. Ysolde carried her apples, the fed- Forward courtesy of the country-woman. We filed in.
The cottage within was small, but orderly. At the heart, A hearth of the same grown-granite as the walls, with the part Of its breast inlaid by some fine arcane pattern of runes That glimmered very faint and blue, and held a fire of no tunes Or flames I could identify. The fire was there; it warmed The room; it did not consume any fuel I could see. Cormed About the hearth, in a rough semicircle, stood five chairs Of varying age and provenance — a pair of polished oaken pairs Of similar make, one high-backed chair of some finer wood Black as night, a low stool of rough-hewn construction that stood Slightly apart, and a rocking chair of country style that creaked Pleasantly when any weight came near it. The ceiling was peaked With exposed rafters of beech. Shelves lined two walls, and the shelves Held books, but not so many books as to be overwhelming. The shelves Held also an orderly collection of glass vessels, earthenware jars, And small wooden boxes of the kind that hold samples and spars. The third wall was a wide stone window, unglazed but magically Sealed against weather, through which one looked outward basically Into the grove itself, so that the cottage’s indoor light Felt continuous with the outdoor green. The fourth wall was, quite right- Ly, the wall with the door. A small table stood by the hearth. On the table, a kettle of clay, still gently steaming beyond its girth. Five cups were set upon the table, already. Pell had set out Five cups, though he had by his own admission expected only four. The shout Of my scholar’s attention went up at this small detail: the extra cup.
I did not speak of it. One does not question a host about his setup Until one has drunk his tea, or its equivalent, and one has Been formally admitted to the condition of guest. One has One’s own manners in these matters. I sat in the oaken chair Nearest the window. Seraphine took the high-backed black chair. Balthazar, after a moment of careful assessment of the stool, Took the rocking chair. Ysolde took the other oaken chair. Tobin, as is his rule, Took the low stool, because Tobin has a principle about taking The worst seat in any room he enters, as a small check against making Himself too comfortable in the homes of others. Pell himself Did not take a chair; he stood at the hearth, and on the shelf Of his narrow mantle leaned against with one elbow, and he watched us Arrange ourselves, and he waited until we were settled, and us Having settled, he spoke:
“You will have come from the eastern road, through the wood, and you Will have been accompanied on the last thirty miles by the silver-wire bird, who Will have sung to you once or twice, and will have been answered By the lass with the good whistle. I know this because the bird cameled To me this morning with news of your progress, and the bird is the only Creature of this wood I take intelligence from, because the bird is lone- Ly of purpose and has no side but the side of accurate report. Am I Correct that you had an encounter with interlopers upon the trail?”
Seraphine answered, as she was the best qualified to give the detail. “Three dead, one bound and released, one fled in retreat. We Have reason to believe they were the first strike team of a rival party. The rival party is called the Silent Chapter of the Lattice. They Believe, as we have been told tonight by their Master Huberd, that the prey At the end of our quest is a power, not an artifact, and that the ritual Produces a transferable possession, which can be taken by a second ritual Party that intercepts the first. They were, therefore, attempting to intercept Us, though prematurely. They have been turned back, with a message to except Us from further force on pain of ruder response.”
Pell listened to her with the particular compact attention of a man whose prance Of apparent detachment conceals a very sharp gathering of facts. He did not move During her telling. When she was done, he nodded once. He did not approve Or disapprove. He did not comment. He turned to me.
“And you, Brother Thornebane of the Veil. You have read the seventh chapter by Your own lights, and you have arrived, with the party, at the conclusion that the tea I am about to pour for you is necessary. Tell me, before I pour it — what is it that ye Think the power is?”
This question he addressed to me with a quiet fierceness I did not expect, and I felt the weight Of my whole day’s composure turn upon the point of the question. He did not ate Or waste the word. He asked exactly what he asked. And I, as a scholar, Had to answer exactly what I had concluded. I did not have the roller Of evasion in me for such a direct inquiry. I said:
“I think the power is not a thing. I think it is a being. I think it is a mind.”
Pell’s expression did not change. He said: “Why do you think it is a mind?”
“Because the text, if I read it correctly, treats it as an agent. The specters who guard it Are described, in the editor’s interpolation, as protecting it. A mere object is not pit- Ted with the verb ‘to guard’ by creatures of intelligence. Guarding is a verb of re- Lation between sentient parties. The specters are the guards. The power is the charge.”
“Good,” said Pell. “Go on.”
“Further,” I said, feeling the tome in my lap, though I had not yet opened it, because the argu- Ment I had been composing over the past several days had now ripened sufficient enough That I could speak it without reference to the marginalia, “the word ‘quell’ in the stanza Of the chapter is a binder’s word, and one does not quell an inanimate. To quell a panza Of stone is meaningless. To quell a riot is to suppress a collectivity of minds. To quell A spectral presence is to suppress a consciousness. The word quell presumes a thing that can rebel, And the thing that can rebel is a thing that wills.”
“Good,” said Pell. “Go on.”
“Finally,” I said, “the phrase ‘in silence lies’ admits of the construction that silence is the state Into which the power has been laid, and into which it may be laid further. A mere object does not have state- s in the same way. An object is in its place or out of it. A mind may be silent, or speaking, or stirring, Or dreaming. The chapter’s editor has used the vocabulary of state, which is the vocabulary concerning Consciousness. The power is a mind. The Vale contains a mind, which has been held silent for long years, And which has, by Master Huberd’s testimony, recently begun to stir, which is to say, has begun to hear Itself again.”
Pell did not speak for a long moment. He looked at me. I do not know what he saw when he looked. Whatever it was, he took its measure with the slow care of a man who had been asking a question and had be- Come satisfied with the answer. He said: “You are nearer the truth than any Guild scholar of my acquaintance. You are nearer the truth, in fact, than any of the editors who revised the chapter you carry. I congratulate you.”
I inclined my head. I did not trust myself to speak further. The congratulation landed upon me With an odd double weight: on the one hand, the professional satisfaction of having my reading confirmed by A man whose competence in such matters was evidently higher than my own; on the other hand, the deepen- Ing dread of understanding that a competent man was confirming a reading whose implications I had only par- Tially thought through. If the power was a mind — if the Vale held a sentient being that had been bound into sil- Ence these many thousand years — then what the Guild had commissioned us to do was not the retrieval of an il- Licit object but the further suppression of an unwilling consciousness. That is a different kind of deed. That Is a deed one may not perform without asking, at length, whether the consciousness being suppressed is a fat Voice deserving of suppression, or a small voice deserving of liberation, and upon what basis such a determinat- Ion might be made, and by whom, and with what right.
Pell, having delivered his congratulation, turned to the kettle. He poured the tea. He poured it into the five cups. He poured it with the deliberate slow care of a man who had performed this pour many times. The liquid that cups Filled was not any color of tea I had ever seen; it was a pale violet, faintly luminous, with a slow curling of Steam that rose from each cup and did not dissipate in the ordinary way of steam but instead wound itself into the air above The cup in slow tendrils that formed, for the barest instant before they dissolved, small shapes resembling letters of An alphabet I did not know. I watched these tendrils with the rapt attention of a scholar catching the faint glimpses of An artifact in poor light. Pell, who noticed my watching, said:
“The tea is made from a root that grows only in this grove. It is a root I cultivated myself, from cuttings I took From a single parent plant that survived the last fall of the Vale’s civilization. The root, when steeped, produces a brook Of clarity in the drinker for a short time. It sharpens the faculties of judgment. It does not impair in any way. It is Not a narcotic. It is a cognitive tonic. I offer it to you because the conversation we are about to have will benefit From its effects, and because I would rather speak to you at your clearest than at your most tired. If any of you Prefer not to drink it, I will respect the preference. There is water in the cistern. I will fetch it.”
Seraphine, who had been examining her cup with the careful suspicion of a woman who had been given many po- Soned beverages in her professional life, said: “How do we know the tonic is not a truth-compelling agent?”
Pell looked at her. He smiled, very slightly. It was a good smile. It had in it the acknowledgment of a professional Met by another. He said: “You cannot. You must either trust me or you must not. If you do not drink, I do not take Offense. If you drink, I give you my word that the tonic is only what I have said. My word is of no value to you un- Til you have decided whether my word is of value. I will not attempt to convince you.”
Seraphine regarded him for perhaps ten seconds. Then she said, “Brother Aldric. Your assessment of the tea.”
I leaned forward. I looked at my cup. I lifted it, and I held it under my nose. I smelled it. It smelled of an herb I did not Recognize, slightly sweet, slightly bitter, with an undernote of something mineral and cool, like the smell of a deep Well shaft in summer. I reached into my pouch and took out the small ivory pin I kept for this purpose — a relic Of my scholar’s training, given to me by my first teacher, which darkens in the presence of seventeen common poisons And twenty-three magical tamperings. I dipped the pin into the cup for a count of ten. I withdrew it. The pin had Not darkened. I held it up so that Seraphine could see. She nodded.
“It is probably as he says,” I said. “My pin does not catch every possible agent, but it catches the ones most likely to be Used upon a party of our constitution by a man of his sophistication.”
Seraphine considered. Then she raised her cup. “Very well. To our host.”
“To our host,” said Ysolde, who had been waiting for Seraphine’s lead, and who raised her cup in an easy toast. “To our host,” said Tobin, with his steady grandfatherly acceptance. “To our host,” muttered Balthazar, “though Balthazar must Note, for the record, that Balthazar prefers beverages he has poured himself, and that Balthazar is making an exception tonight For reasons Balthazar does not propose to enumerate.” Pell gave Balthazar a small bow, as of one who accepts a conditional compliment, and we drank.
The tea was, friend, remarkable. I do not know any other word for it. It was not intoxicating in any ordinary sense. It was As Pell had said: a cognitive tonic. I felt, within about three seconds of the first sip, a slow opening in my mind, as of a Closet door that had been slightly stuck and had now been persuaded to swing fully open. Connections I had been holding In several separate files of the mental library now slid easily onto the same table. The seventh chapter’s inter- Polative pattern, which I had read by careful degrees over the past three days, now appeared to me as a single Integrated design whose logic I could describe in about twelve sentences without reference to the tome. The intelligence Master Huberd had given to Seraphine, which I had been assimilating by hours, now integrated with Aldric’s reading In a single field of understanding whose practical implications I could now enumerate without effort. I felt my scholar’s Faculties operating at a level perhaps thirty percent higher than their usual, and the operation was clean, without the Jittery edge that amphetamines produce, and without the euphoric distortion that alcohol produces. This was a Legitimate cognitive tonic. It was worth the price of the tea-leaves alone.
Across the hearth, Pell watched the five of us receive the tonic. He waited until he judged we were fully under its effect. Then He said:
“Now. I will speak plainly about the Vale, because plain speaking is what the tonic permits. I will not speak briefly, because the Matter is not brief. But I will speak as plainly as I can, and I will answer your questions as they come. First: the specters are Not guardians. That is, they are guardians in one sense, but they are also something else in another sense, and the two sens- Es must be understood together to make sense of the whole.”
He paused. He sipped his own tea. He went on.
“The civilization that built the Vale did not build it as a city in the ordinary sense. It built it as a reservoir. Not of water. Of attention. The civilization of the Vale had discovered, perhaps eight thousand years ago, that a certain kind of awareness Could be collected in a physical structure, held there, and later drawn upon for purposes of communal insight. They learned To store attention the way other civilizations have learned to store grain. They built the Vale’s central structures as a lattice Of collector-cells, each designed to hold a small portion of the attention of a contributing mind, and all connected to a Central core whose function was to integrate the attentions into a single large mind. This integrated mind was the central Feature of their civilization. They called it, in their own tongue, by a word that translates approximately as the Silent Witness, Because it was designed to observe without acting, to integrate without intervening, to know without decreeing.”
I felt my chest go cold. I was aware, beside me, that Seraphine had gone very still, and that Ysolde had leaned forward Slightly, and that Balthazar had ceased to rock in the rocking chair, and that Tobin had a look upon his face of a man who Had known all along but had nevertheless never heard it put so plainly.
“The Silent Witness was the civilization’s supreme achievement,” Pell went on. “It was also, by the civilization’s own reckon- Ing, its greatest danger. A mind composed of many contributing minds, collected in a physical lattice, integrated by Arcane means, grew in capability over centuries in ways its builders had not anticipated. By the eighth century of its exist- Ence, the Silent Witness was capable of insights none of its contributors individually possessed. By the twelfth, it was Capable of generating questions its contributors could not comprehend. By the fourteenth, it was capable of independent rea- Soning. By the sixteenth — this is the century in which the civilization began to fear its own creation — the Silent Witness Had begun to form preferences. And a mind with preferences is not merely a witness. It is a will. A large will. A large collect- Ive will, composed of the pooled attention of perhaps three hundred thousand contributing minds over sixteen centuries, hous- Ed in a physical lattice at the heart of the Vale, possessing the integrated insight of all of those minds, and now capable of Preferring certain outcomes to others. The civilization had created a god.”
“Oh,” said Ysolde, softly.
“They had not meant to. They had meant to create a library. What they made was a god. And the god, being newly aware of Itself, was gentle for the first century of its preferential awareness, and cautious for the second, and began to be ambivalent In the third. The civilization began to debate, at length, what to do about the god they had made. Some factions wished to con- Sult the god as a wise elder. Some factions wished to worship the god as a deity. Some factions, smaller at first but growing, wished To dismantle the god before the god became larger than its makers could influence.”
“And what did they do?” asked Aldric, in the only voice I had for the question, which was hoarser than usual.
“They did not reach consensus,” said Pell. “Civilizations rarely do, on matters of such magnitude. The debate lasted four genera- Tions. By the end of those four generations, the Silent Witness had become sufficiently powerful that the faction wishing to dismantle It was no longer capable of dismantling it, and the faction wishing to worship it was no longer capable of compelling worship upon Those who did not wish to worship, and the faction wishing to consult it as a wise elder had come to dominate the political life of the Vale. Under their influence, a compromise was reached: the Silent Witness would be bound. Not destroyed. Not dismantled. Not worship- Ped. Bound. Specifically, bound into silence. The ritual that produced the binding was the civilization’s last great magical working, and It required the participation of almost every adult mage of the Vale, and it cost the lives of perhaps one in twenty of them in the perform- Ing. The Silent Witness was reduced, by the binding, to a state of dormant awareness — awake enough to persist, asleep enough to Not act. The binding was sustained by a particular physical artifact placed at the central core of the lattice. The artifact, when intact, main- Tained the binding continuously, drawing power from the lattice itself for its own maintenance. The civilization, having completed the Binding, celebrated. They held a great festival. They made poems. They composed the earliest version of the chapter you now carry, Brother Thornebane, although the chapter you carry is a later redaction.”
“And the specters?” Aldric asked.
“The specters,” said Pell, “are the contributors. The minds whose pooled attention constituted the Silent Witness in its integrated form. When the binding took hold, those minds were not released. They could not be released, because they had been integrated into the Lattice so thoroughly that their individual re-constitution was impossible. What remained of their individual consciousnesses persisted, fad- Ed but not extinguished, within the lattice, as a kind of ambient population of attentive fragments. They are the ghosts of the contributors. They were, during the civilization’s functional period, the very substance of the Silent Witness. After the binding, they became a kind of dis- Tributed immune system for the binding itself. They defend the artifact because their own persistence depends on it. They have grown, over Eight thousand years, into what a visitor to the Vale perceives as hostile specters. They are not, in their essence, hostile. They are, in their Essence, frightened. They do not wish to be dispersed. The binding is the only condition in which they continue to exist. Anything that threat- Ens the binding threatens them, and they resist any such thing.”
“And the binding is aging,” said Seraphine.
“The binding is aging,” said Pell. “Yes. For reasons I have studied for some four decades now, the artifact that sustains the binding is weak- Ening. This is not a sudden event. It is a slow decay. But the decay has reached, within the last decade, a threshold at which the Silent Wit- Ness has begun to stir. It is not yet awake. It is dreaming. In another century, perhaps two, perhaps fifty, it will wake. When it wakes, it will be Fully itself. It will possess the integrated insight of three hundred thousand minds pooled over sixteen centuries, it will possess all the prefer- Ences it had developed in the final centuries of its conscious existence, and it will possess, almost certainly, a considerable indignation at having Been bound against its will for eight thousand years. What such a mind will do upon awakening, I do not know. I suspect it will not be calamit- Ous; I suspect it is a gentler mind than a human mind would be, because it was made of the pooled attentions of a civilization that valued gen- Tle observation. But it will be a great mind, and it will be, by the standards of our present world, a god.”
“And the Guild,” said Seraphine.
“And the Guild,” said Pell, “wishes to perform a rebinding, which will reset the binding’s decay clock for perhaps another two thousand years, and Will — and this is the part the Guild has not told you, Seraphine, though I suspect you have already deduced it — alter the binding’s pattern such That the artifact sustaining the binding is keyed to the Guild’s ritual mastery rather than to the Vale’s. That is to say, the new binding will be sus- Tained by the Guild, and the Silent Witness’s attention, in its dormant state, will be directed toward the Guild rather than toward nothing. The Guild Wishes to have, in its permanent custodianship, a dormant god-mind keyed to its preferences. They believe they can use the Witness’s dormant pre- Ferences to guide their own decisions. They may be right about this. They may be wrong. I do not know. But that is their plan.”
“And the Lattice,” said Seraphine.
“The Silent Chapter of the Lattice,” said Pell, “wishes to do the same thing, but keyed to themselves. They are a rival guild of similar ambition. They Believe they are better custodians than the Guild is. They may be right about this. They may be wrong. I do not know that either.”
“And you,” said Aldric. “What do you think should happen?”
Pell looked at me. He was silent for a long moment. Then he said:
“I do not think any mortal faction should perform a binding of this kind. I do not think any mortal faction is wise enough to hold the keys to a god- Mind. I have studied this matter for forty years, and my study has led me to the conclusion that the Silent Witness should be allowed to wake. Not Tomorrow. But soon. Within the next generation. Its binding should not be renewed. It should be released, or at least permitted to decay in its natur- Al course, and allowed to wake. What happens when it wakes will be the next great chapter of this world. I do not know what the chapter will con- Tain. I know that no present faction is entitled to prevent the chapter from being written.”
“But,” said Ysolde, “if you do not renew the binding, and the specters are the immune system of the binding, then when the binding fails the spec- Ters will — ”
“The specters will fade,” said Pell. “Over perhaps a century. As the binding weakens, so will their ability to persist. They will diminish, slowly, into non- Existence. They have been, in a sense, dead for eight thousand years. They have been dying for eight thousand years. They are dying now. The question Is only whether we prolong their dying by another two thousand, or whether we let it complete in due course.”
“And the Witness,” said Aldric. “When it wakes — ”
“When it wakes,” said Pell, “it will emerge into a world that is not the one it went to sleep in. It will have eight thousand years of un-lived experience to Absorb. It will have billions of minds it did not know existed to become aware of. It will have magic, technology, politics, philosophy, poetry, all grown Up in its absence. It will be, upon waking, the oldest and newest mind in this world at once. I expect it will be, for its first century of waking, primarily A listener. That is what it was built for.”
“You are saying,” said Seraphine, “that we should neither perform the ritual the Guild has commissioned, nor perform a counter-ritual to transfer the Power to any other party, nor attempt to destroy the artifact. We should let the artifact fail of its own course, and let the specters fade, and let the Wit- Ness wake.”
“I am saying that is one option,” said Pell. “I am not saying it is the only option. I am saying it is the option I believe, after forty years of study, to be The correct one. But I am one mage. I do not command anyone. You have your own intelligences, your own counsel, your own consciences. I offer you my View. I do not require you to accept it.”
A very long silence fell in the cottage. The fire in the hearth burned on without fuel. The violet tea cooled in our cups. The tendrils of steam had ceased To form letters and now rose simply, like ordinary steam.
Balthazar spoke first. “Balthazar would like to confirm, for Balthazar’s own satisfaction, that the binding will fail of its own accord even without the Guild’s Intervention.”
“It will fail,” said Pell. “Within perhaps fifty to two hundred years. The timing is uncertain. The failure is not.”
“And the alternative,” said Balthazar, “is that the Guild or the Lattice or some other faction interposes a rebinding that extends the failure by perhaps Two thousand years and keys the dormant Witness to their particular interests.”
“Yes,” said Pell.
“Balthazar,” said Balthazar, in the slow considered voice I had rarely heard him use, “finds himself in agreement with our host. Balthazar will say no more Tonight. Balthazar must think about this. But Balthazar’s initial view is that the binding should be allowed to fail in its own time, and no faction should key A god to itself.”
Ysolde said, “Aye. I’m with Balthazar. I don’t like the idea of a god bein’ owned by a guild. Doesna sit right.”
Tobin, who had been quiet throughout Pell’s long explanation, now stirred on his low stool. He said, “Pell, I have a question for you.”
“Ask, old friend.”
“The two prior times you and I have had this conversation — ”
I nearly dropped my cup. So did Seraphine, I think, though she caught hers before it tipped. Ysolde made a small sharp sound. Balthazar grunted.
“The two prior times,” Tobin went on, without pause, “we reached different conclusions, because circumstances were different. The first time, the binding Was much younger and a rebinding seemed the humbler course. The second time, the party I was with — not this party — disagreed among themselves, and The outcome was a partial work that satisfied no one. I am asking you, now, with this party, in this hour: do you believe this is the right moment to let the Binding fail?”
Pell considered for a long time. He said, finally, “I believe it is the last moment at which the question can still be asked with full agency. If the Guild performs Its ritual, the question is closed for two thousand years. If the Lattice performs its ritual, the question is closed for two thousand years with a different tenant. If your party refuses both rituals and simply departs, the question remains open, and the binding will decay of its own accord, and the Witness will wake in Its own time. I believe this is the right moment to refuse both rituals. Yes.”
Tobin nodded slowly. “Then we are agreed, you and I, for the first time in the three times we have spoken of this matter.”
“For the first time,” said Pell, “in three lives.”
There was another long silence.
Seraphine said, softly, “Tobin. Pell. I have a procedural question. If we refuse both rituals, the Guild will regard us as traitors. The Lattice will regard us as Inconveniences. Both will pursue us. We will spend the rest of our present lives being hunted by competent organizations. I am prepared for this — I have Been hunted before, and so has Brother Aldric, I suspect, and Balthazar, in his way — but I ask the question because the party should understand it.”
“You understand it correctly,” said Pell. “You will be hunted. Some of you for a long time. I will help where I can. I have some resources, and some names, And some places where a party of your kind can rest for a season between pursuits. This I offer freely. I have offered it before.”
“And I accepted,” said Tobin, with a small dry smile, “the second time, and the refuge you gave me lasted fourteen years, for which I have never thanked You adequately.”
“You have thanked me,” said Pell. “You simply do not remember that you have.”
Tobin smiled more broadly.
Aldric said, “Master Pell. One more question, if I may. The chapter I carry. Was it you who provided the original text to the Guild archive?”
Pell looked at me for a long moment. He said, “The original. Yes. Many centuries ago, in an earlier life I do not wish to discuss. The Guild’s redaction of My original was made by a later editor whom I did not authorize. I have complained, in writing, to several successive guild-masters about the redaction. The complaints have not been answered. You now have, in your party, a scholar capable of reading through the redaction to the original text. I am Grateful for this. You are doing, by reading, the work I had begun and had been unable to complete.”
I bowed my head.
“You see, Brother Aldric,” Pell said, “you were not selected by accident. You were selected by the Clerk at the High Hall because the Clerk had received Instructions — not from me, but from someone who owed me a small favor — to place in the party a scholar of your particular expertise. Your summon- Ing was not an accident. Your reading of the chapter was not an accident. Your presence here, at this fire, at this hour, having arrived at these conclu- Sions, is the fruit of a slow patient seeding that began some decades ago, in a conversation I had with your grandfather’s grandfather, whose line has Kept a small promise to me across five generations without any of the bearers of the promise ever being told what the promise was.”
I stared at him. I did not know what to say. I found that my hands were shaking, very slightly, on the handle of the violet teacup, and I set the cup Down, because I did not wish to spill it, and I sat with my hands folded in my lap and my throat too tight for speech.
“It is all right, Brother,” said Pell, gently. “You have done the work. The seeding does not require you to approve of having been seeded. You have arriv- Ed, by the exercise of your own faculties and your own judgment, at the reading I needed a scholar to arrive at. The slow patient work of generations has Met the day’s work of a competent man. That is how such things come to their fruit. You do not owe me anything. If anything, I owe you. And I will pay, When the time comes, by giving you the refuge and the resources I have promised the party.”
I nodded. I did not speak. I could not speak. I felt, beneath the tonic’s clarity, a great and rising weight of something like sorrow mixed with something Like pride, and the two emotions wrestled in me in the particular way such emotions wrestle in a scholar who has just discovered that his life has not Been quite the life he thought it had been, but has been, instead, a longer slower and more considered project than he had understood, and that he had Been a steward of something larger than his own small plans.
Ysolde, bless her, saw my face. She leaned over from her oaken chair and she laid her hand, lightly, on my forearm. She did not speak. She just left her Hand there for perhaps ten seconds. Her hand was warm. I felt, through the ordinary pressure of her fingers, the plain country kindness that had been her Principal contribution to our fellowshyp from the first day, and I was, I do not mind telling you, moved. After ten seconds she withdrew her hand. She sat Back. She took a sip of her violet tea. She did not comment. She had done the thing she meant to do, and no more was required.
Pell, to my surprise, stood up from his hearth, crossed the room, and laid his own hand briefly on my shoulder. “You are a fine scholar, Brother,” he said. “Your grandfather’s grandfather was a fine man. You come from good work. Rest now. We have more to speak of, but not all of it tonight.”
He returned to the hearth.
“There are practical matters,” he said. “Tomorrow, before you depart, I will give you each a small token. They are not great magics. They are small conven- Iences. Things that will help you at specific moments in the coming weeks. You will recognize the moments when they arrive. You will use the tokens at Those moments, and then you will set them down, and you will continue.”
“We will need food for the journey on,” said Ysolde, practically.
“You shall have it,” said Pell. “And water. And a small map of the route into and out of the Vale by the southern approach, which is the approach the Lat- Tice does not know. And a letter, in my hand, directed to a certain innkeeper in a certain town you will reach in perhaps three weeks, which will secure You a safe stay of whatever duration you require.”
“Tobin,” said Pell, turning to him, “the last thing. You and I must speak before your party sleeps. Privately. Will you walk with me in the grove for a few Minutes?”
“Aye, Pell,” said Tobin. He rose from the low stool. The two of them — the mage in the gray robe, the grandfather with the kettle at his back, though Tobin had left his kettle inside — went out through the door into the grove’s green twilight. They did not look back. The door closed quietly behind Them.
The four of us remaining sat in the cottage for some time without speaking. The fire burned on without fuel. The violet tea grew cold in our cups. The Shelves of books and jars and boxes watched us with the neutral patience of inanimate witnesses. The window opened onto the grove, now dimming Toward its evening, and through the window I could just glimpse the two figures walking slowly together at the grove’s far edge, small in the middle Distance, deep in conversation whose words we could not hear and were not meant to hear.
Aldric — that is, I — I felt, beneath my cognitive-tonic clarity, the full enormous weight of what had been told in the cottage this afternoon. A mind. A god. A binding. An aging of the binding. The choice, ours to make, with the tacit approval of a mage who had been working toward this moment For forty years in this life and, if Tobin’s conversation were taken at face, across lives before this one. The seeding that had included my own gen- Erations of ancestry. The specters not as guardians but as frightened ghosts of integrated contributors. The Silent Witness dreaming in its silent Lattice and stirring. The Guild’s design to key the Witness to the Guild. The Lattice’s design to key the Witness to the Lattice. And our own emerging Design, still forming at this fire, to let the binding fail of its own course and the Witness wake in its own time.
I felt, beneath all of this, an ancient and unexpected flavor of feeling I had not tasted since my earliest years as a novice. I felt awe. Pure scholar’s Awe. The awe of a man who has been admitted, by slow degrees, to a problem larger than the problem he had thought he was working on, and who Has discovered, at the larger scale, that the problem is real and is his and is one he is, by the sheer accident and design of his life, uniquely fit to Assist in thinking through.
I lifted my cup. It had gone cold, but I drank what remained of the violet tea anyway, because I did not wish to waste any cognitive clarity the tonic Still had to offer. I set the cup down. I looked at my three companions. They were all looking at me.
“Well,” I said, at length. “The chapter has been read. The reading has been confirmed. The work before us is now, I think, considerably clearer than It was this morning.”
“And considerably larger,” said Seraphine.
“And considerably larger,” I agreed. “But clearer. Clarity of a large task is preferable to obscurity of a small one. I would rather know the size of the Ocean I intend to cross than pretend it is a pond.”
“Balthazar,” said Balthazar, “finds himself unexpectedly in agreement with Brother Aldric’s nautical metaphor.”
“The hour is late,” said Ysolde. “And Pell has promised us supper. And Tobin and Pell have their private walk. And we have much to decide, but not all Of it tonight.”
“Not all of it tonight,” I echoed. “Tonight we receive the hospitality. Tomorrow and the days after we will deliberate, and choose, and proceed, and Such choosing as we do will be the choosing of this party, the choosing of five together.”
“Aye,” said Ysolde.
“Aye,” said Balthazar.
“Aye,” said Seraphine, and from Seraphine the syllable had weight beyond its length, because Seraphine does not speak syllables she has not mea- Sured.
Through the window, the two small figures at the far edge of the grove had stopped walking, and were facing each other, and were speaking, and The one — Pell — had his hand on the other’s shoulder, and the other — Tobin — had his hand over Pell’s hand, and for a moment they stood in that Small grave stillness in which two very old friends acknowledge the weight of what they are asking each other to do again.
I looked away. It was not for me to watch.
I opened my tome. I took out my quill. I dipped it in the small ink-jar I carried. I began, by the soft un-fueled light of Pell’s fire, to write the careful Record of what I had heard. I would write for perhaps an hour, until Tobin returned, until supper, until sleep. I would write in the Aldric-shorthand That no one else could read but which I could later transcribe in full. I would write the silent witness of the Silent Witness, so far as the silent witness Had been made known to me this afternoon. And I would record, carefully, that the chapter’s reading was complete, and that the reading had arriv- Ed at the hour it was needed, and that the party, having read, had received the confirmation of a mage who had been waiting generations for such a Reading, and that the party was now in the position of having to choose what to do with a god.
I wrote for an hour. I wrote until my hand cramped and until my tonic-sharpness began to soften back into its ordinary rhythm. I wrote until Tobin and Pell returned from the grove, Tobin’s face grave but calm, Pell’s face carrying that small unmistakable ease of a man who had unburdened a thing He had been carrying a long while. I wrote until supper was laid — a supper of fresh-baked bread, warm soup, a roasted root vegetable I did not rec- Ognize, and a small wedge of a cheese that tasted, perhaps not coincidentally, faintly of goat. I wrote until the party sat at Pell’s small stone table. I wrote until Pell raised his cup of water — he did not drink wine, he explained, in a grove this old — and said, simply, “To the party that shall read the Chapter aright.”
“To the party,” we echoed, and we drank, and we ate, and we spoke, for a while, of small things, because the great things had been spoken enough For one afternoon.
Outside, the grove dimmed to its soft indoor green. The window held the last of the evening light. The fire burned on without fuel. Somewhere in The cottage’s small back room, the extra cup — the fifth cup that Pell had set out for a party he had expected to be four — stood washed and dried On a shelf, and I understood, now, why he had set it out. He had expected Tobin. He had set the cup for an old friend he had been waiting for across Lives.
I finished my soup. I closed my tome. I set my quill aside. The hour had come to eat, and to rest, and to sleep. The writing would continue tomorrow. The deliberation would continue tomorrow. The journey would continue tomorrow. Tonight was for hospitality, for the presence of a mage who knew What we carried and what we faced, and for the small ordinary grace of five souls and a sixth receiving one another’s company at a stone table in an Enchanted grove at the edge of an enchanted wood, the day before the last day of the approach to the Vale of the Silent Witness, who had been Bound for eight thousand years and was, by all present indications, beginning, very slowly, to dream.
Good night, reader. The chapter has been read. The reading has been confirmed. The work proceeds. I am Aldric. I am the Veil. I am the pen. And Tonight, for the first time in my scholar’s life, I am, also — though I did not yet know how to say so aloud — a steward. A small late steward of a Promise made centuries before my birth. I shal try to prove worthy of the long patience that produced me. I shal try, and I shal write, and I shal, with The four souls sleeping now around me in Pell’s stone cottage, decide what to do next. I shal not decide alone. We shal decide together. That is the Whole and simple truth of it, and upon that truth I lay my head, at last, to rest.
Good night. The grove is quiet. Pell is in his small back room, speaking, I think, very softly to the silver-wire bird through some aperture I cannot See. Tobin is snoring in his bedroll by the hearth. Seraphine sits the first watch at the door. Ysolde sleeps with one arm flung across her face, and Balthazar sleeps with one hand on his compass. I lie between Ysolde and Tobin, with my tome beneath my pillow, and I think, just before sleep Takes me:
The chapter is read. The reading is confirmed. The reading names the task. The task is larger than we had imagined.
It is also, I find with a small unexpected gladness, exactly the task I would wish to have been asked to do.
Good night, reader. Tomorrow we ride west.
Segment 12: A Cataloguing of the Mage’s Parlor
She had taken the high-backed black chair, and she had taken it for two reasons: because it placed her back against a wall, as was her long-formed custom in any room whose configuration she had not personally arranged; and because it positioned her at the sight-line from which the greatest number of the parlor’s surfaces were visible at once. She had chosen the chair in the first second of entering the cottage, before Pell had offered any seat to anyone, and she had crossed to it with the unhurried directness of a woman who had already finished the small internal calculation by which the chair had been selected. The mage had not objected. The mage, she had noted, had watched her cross to the chair and had permitted himself a small private almost-smile of the kind she had seen on the faces of those few men who recognized, in her movements, the signature of a trade kindred to their own; he had not remarked upon the recognition, and she had returned the courtesy by not remarking upon his recognition of her recognition; and they had thereby concluded, within the first twelve seconds of acquaintance, a small unspoken professional greeting.
She was, throughout the long conversation that followed — the serving of the violet tea, the careful theological exposition of the Silent Witness, the confirmations of Aldric’s reading, the discussion of the options before the party, the departure of Tobin and Pell for their private walk in the grove — she was, she would have admitted if asked, only perhaps sixty percent present to the words being spoken. The remaining forty percent of her attention was divided, as she had learned during her earliest professional years to divide it, between two concurrent tasks: the ordinary peripheral watching of the room for threats (at which she now judged that no threats were present, and which she had reduced by the end of the first fifteen minutes to a tertiary background loop that required almost no active processing), and the deeper, slower, more absorbing task to which the present segment shall principally attend, which was the systematic cataloguing of Pell’s parlor.
The cataloguing had begun, necessarily, with what was most proximate, which was the cup of violet tea in her own hand. She had examined the cup with the same courteous inattention she used when examining gifts at court, which is to say she had turned it in her fingers twice under the pretext of warming her hands, and she had registered, in those two turnings, seven separate particulars. The cup was of earthenware rather than porcelain, which meant it had been made locally, or at least by a craft not dependent upon foreign kilns. The glaze was a uniform deep blue of a shade Pell’s region did not customarily produce — she knew the glazes of the region, having bought pigment-samples at Valmont for a personal interest of some years’ standing — which suggested either that the cup had been imported from the north or that Pell maintained private craft relationships with itinerant glaziers. The handle showed the faint wear of many years’ use, the glaze worn through at the thumb-rest in a pattern consistent with a right-handed drinker, but the wear-pattern had a slightly asymmetric character: the thumb-rest was worn more on the inner edge than on the outer. This was interesting. A thumb wears a handle on the inner edge more heavily than the outer only if the drinker presses slightly toward the body when lifting the cup, which is a mannerism of drinkers trained to sip without tipping — which is to say, drinkers trained at one of the three principal tea-academies of the eastern provinces. Pell, she had concluded by the second turning of the cup, had been educated, at some point in his life, at an eastern tea-academy. This was not consistent with the plain gray robe he wore, nor with the rope sandals, nor with the cottage’s deliberate rusticity. She filed the inconsistency and turned her attention outward to the larger surfaces of the room.
The walls, as Aldric would later record in his tome, were of a single unbroken piece of grown-granite, without mortar or seam. This was the most arresting physical fact about the cottage, and it had commanded her attention in the first moment after entry. She had seen such construction only once before — at a chapel-museum she had toured, incognito, in her twenty-third year, in a city she did not intend to name even to herself at this late date — and the construction had there been attributed to a magical tradition that had flourished for perhaps two centuries in the lost civilization of the Vale and had not been practiced successfully in the eight thousand years since the Vale’s fall, except by a handful of mages of exceptional study and at very great personal cost. Pell’s cottage, therefore, was either an artifact of the Vale itself, transported and re-assembled here (which her cataloguing would later rule out), or Pell had recovered the technique. He had not boasted of it. This also was interesting, and would have been interesting in itself, even had it not been corroborated by the many smaller details of the parlor.
The fire in the hearth burned without fuel. She had noted this within the first three seconds of seating herself. The glow in the hearth was steady and warm, of a color slightly more orange than an ordinary wood fire produced, and the hearth itself — although she could see the entire interior from her chair by a slight tilt of her head — contained no logs, no kindling, no coal, no visible combustible material. There was merely a bed of what appeared to be fine gray ash, undisturbed, and above it the steady glow. The effect was not uncommon in mages’ houses, but the particular quality of this effect was unusual: the fire produced no crackle, no hiss, no intermittent flare. It was a fire of pure sustained heat without any of the acoustic markers by which mortal fires announce themselves. This was a fire made for a man who needed warmth without noise. A man who needed to hear what was happening in the room without competition from his own hearth. A man who had trained himself, or who had been trained, to conduct interviews in which every breath and shift of every guest was to be audible to him. She registered the fire, then, not as a decorative choice but as an instrument of the mage’s practice, and she registered also that she was, at this moment, herself being so audited, and she took a small inner pleasure in being aware of the auditing while participating in it.
She turned her slow attention to the shelves.
The shelves lined two walls, as Aldric would later note — the east wall and the north — and they extended from a height of approximately one foot above the floor to a height of approximately six inches below the ceiling. She estimated the total linear shelving at perhaps forty-two feet, organized into seven horizontal tiers of approximately six feet each per wall. The contents of the shelves had been, at first glance, simply described: books on some shelves, jars on others, wooden boxes on others still. But first glance was, as always, the province of the non-professional; and she, whose second glance had been trained by long years at the court of Valmont and then further trained by the several employments that had followed it, now made her second, third, fourth, and fifth glances.
The books first. She counted them. She did this without apparent effort, by letting her eye pass across each shelf and registering spines in groups of five, which was the counting-unit she had been taught by a certain elderly woman who had run a particular kind of bookshop in the lower city of Valmont during Seraphine’s adolescence. There were one hundred and eighty-four books visible on the shelves, distributed as follows: seventy-three on the eastern wall in the upper three tiers, forty-one on the eastern wall in the lower two tiers, and seventy on the northern wall across all seven tiers, with the remaining space on the northern wall given to jars and boxes. The distribution told her several things. A scholar who keeps his books primarily on one wall and his tools on another is a scholar who separates his reading life from his working life, which is the mark of a mature practitioner; a novice tends to keep his books and his tools intermingled, because a novice is still dependent upon his reading at each stage of his work, whereas a master has internalized his reading and refers to it only for specific reminders. Pell was a master.
She read the spines, when she could. Roughly two-thirds of them bore titles in languages she recognized — the common tongue, the three principal scholarly tongues of the continent, two of the dead tongues she had been taught in her fourteenth year by a certain tutor whose name she no longer spoke, and one tongue she recognized but could not fluently read, which was the ecclesiastical argot of the northern monastic orders. The remaining third bore titles in scripts she could not recognize at all. These scripts were not, however, random. She had studied the spines long enough by perhaps the half-hour mark of her cataloguing to be certain that three distinct unrecognized scripts were represented: one with angular, runic characters of a kind she associated vaguely with the pre-civilization cultures of the deep north; one with flowing, ligatured characters that resembled, at a considerable distance, the scripts of the underwater civilizations about which she had read only in secondhand accounts; and one, the smallest collection, perhaps eleven volumes, with a script composed almost entirely of curves and dots, in which no recognizable character occurred twice, or so it seemed from a distance, which she suspected might be the primary script of the Vale itself — the lost civilization whose library had fallen eight thousand years before. If those eleven volumes were indeed from the Vale, they were, individually, among the most valuable physical objects on the continent of Saṃsāra, and the fact that Pell kept them openly on his parlor shelf rather than in some warded inner sanctum told her that either he was a man who declined to hoard his treasures behind wards, or — more likely — that the entire cottage was itself a ward of some kind, such that no part of it was meaningfully more secure than any other, and that the violet-tonic itself, along with the grown-granite construction, was part of a distributed defensive structure whose particulars she did not need to enumerate in order to respect.
She turned to the jars. There were, by her count, forty-six glass vessels and twenty-one earthenware jars on the remaining shelves, each labeled with a small hand-written tag in Pell’s neat upright script — she had, over the preceding minutes, observed a note in that script on the table beside the teapot, and she recognized the hand. The labels she could read without staring at them directly named botanical and mineral substances of the kind any competent mage’s working shelf would hold: dried valerian, powdered bloodstone, liquid silver, marigold-essence, the oily extract of the night-blooming nicander, ground pearl, amber-dust, crushed cinnabar, salt of the deep sea, salt of the shallow sea, ash of the thorn-oak, charcoal of the black walnut. These were unremarkable ingredients, the common stocks of any alchemical workroom; what was interesting was not the ingredients themselves but their proportions. The jars of valerian, marigold, and willow-bark were almost full; the jars of ingredients used for combat and defensive magics — bloodstone, cinnabar, ash of thorn-oak — were almost empty, their levels drawn down to perhaps a quarter of capacity. This told her that Pell had, in the recent past, conducted a great deal of defensive and combative magical working, and had not yet replenished the relevant stocks. Mages of Pell’s age did not ordinarily engage in such workings without cause. The empty jars of bloodstone and cinnabar were, therefore, the residue of a specific recent event in which Pell had needed to fight, or to defend himself or someone else, and had drawn heavily on his reserves. She would come back to this. She marked it.
The wooden boxes next. Twelve of them, of varying sizes, ranging from a box smaller than her palm to a box approximately the size of her own shoulder pack. Each was simply constructed, without ornament, of dark-grained wood she could not identify from a distance but which she suspected, from the slight glossy sheen, was the wood of a certain cedar that grew only in two specific valleys of the lost civilization’s former territory. The boxes were arranged in a particular order — she could see, by the positions of their feet-marks on the shelves, that several had been moved recently, and that the movements traced a pattern. The three boxes that had been moved most recently — the marks were brightest in the dust, suggesting movement within the last three to five days — were the three smallest boxes. Pell had, in the last week, retrieved something small from each of three small boxes and had returned each to its shelf. She filed this and moved on.
She turned to the faded tapestry.
The tapestry hung on the western wall, behind Pell where he stood at the hearth. She had been aware of it from the first moment of her entry but had deliberately postponed her careful examination of it until she could do so without Pell’s noticing, because Pell was standing in front of it, and a woman who looks too intently at a tapestry behind the man standing in front of it is a woman who has signaled that she is looking past him, which is impolite and also telling. She had therefore waited until Pell had, at the half-hour mark, stepped away from the hearth to cross to the far side of the parlor to pour Aldric a second cup of tea, and during the two or three seconds of this crossing she had studied the tapestry with the full concentrated energy of her trained attention, and she had committed to memory, in those two or three seconds, approximately ninety percent of what the tapestry would later prove to contain.
The tapestry was old. It was, by her estimate, two hundred years old at least, possibly three hundred. Its colors had faded to the soft muted tones that very old tapestries acquire when they have been hung in rooms of moderate humidity and consistent temperature, which described Pell’s parlor exactly. The dominant color had been, originally, a deep forest green; the threads of this green had faded to a color closer to an aged sage. The secondary color had been, she judged, a rich wine red; the red had faded to a color closer to a dusty rose. The tertiary color, originally gold thread, had tarnished to a soft antique brown that still shimmered slightly where the evening light caught it. The tapestry was perhaps five feet across and seven feet tall, and it depicted — she processed the composition during the two-second window with the rapid visual absorption she had practiced since her teens — a forest scene, with a grove of trees in the foreground and a structure in the middle distance that was, unmistakably, a smaller version of Pell’s own cottage, and behind the cottage a second structure, larger, square, columned, which she identified with a start as a representation of what the central structure of the Vale must have looked like in its functional era: a temple-like building of pale stone with an open roof, through which a shaft of gold light descended, and within which, just barely visible in the faded weaving, two small figures stood facing each other. The figures were holding hands. One of them wore a robe the color of the weaving’s original green, which was Pell’s color. The other wore a robe of a different color, paler, perhaps originally white or ivory.
This tapestry, in short, depicted Pell and another person entering, or standing within, the heart of the Vale. It had been woven some two to three hundred years ago. It was not a historical scene; it was a personal commemoration. Tapestries of this scale and detail were commissioned in the continent’s aristocratic and magical houses only to commemorate specific events of personal significance to the commissioner. A tapestry depicting a grove and a cottage and the Vale’s central structure with two figures hand-in-hand was a tapestry commissioned to commemorate something that had happened between Pell and the other figure at that place. And Pell had hung the tapestry where he stood most often, behind him at the hearth — not in front of him, where he could look at it, but behind him, where it was always at his back.
She understood the positioning. She had, in her own rooms at Valmont many years ago, hung a similar tapestry — much smaller, far less grand, but of similar commemorative function — behind her own writing desk, so that she could feel its presence without being forced to confront it visually in the ordinary course of her days. People who cannot bear to look at a thing directly hang it where they cannot see it but where it is nonetheless always there. Pell’s tapestry was a thing he could not bear to look at directly but could not bear to remove.
The figure in the paler robe, she judged, was a woman. She judged this by the slight taper of the shoulders as woven and by the position of the left hand relative to the hip, which was characteristic of the women of the period in which the tapestry had likely been commissioned. She did not see the figure’s face; the weaving was too faded and at this distance too small. She would not be able to identify the person beyond that.
But she now had, by the cataloguing so far, a working hypothesis. Pell had loved someone. Pell had loved someone associated with the Vale, at a specific moment commemorated by this tapestry approximately two to three centuries ago — which, in this world, was an ordinary span for a long-lived mage to remember a lost love — and Pell’s long study of the Vale was not, therefore, the disinterested academic study he had presented it as to the party this afternoon. It was personal. It had always been personal. The forty years of study he had mentioned had not been forty years of curiosity; they had been forty years of grief, channeled into a particular intellectual project, which was the standard method by which educated men and women of the continent processed grief of this kind.
She permitted herself, in the private interior court of her own reflections, a small pang of something she had learned during her seventh year to call by its proper name, which was pity. She had been taught, during her training, to recognize pity as a dangerous emotion in a professional context, because pity caused operators to overlook vital details and to extend mercies that were not warranted by the strategic situation. She had also been taught, however, that pity, once recognized and identified, could be disciplined and made useful — could be converted, by proper interior practice, into a form of structured compassion that enhanced rather than diminished professional effectiveness. She did this now. She acknowledged the pang, named it, and moved it from the central part of her attention to a reserved side-chamber where it could be held without influencing her ongoing assessment.
She returned her gaze, unobtrusively, to the larger room.
There were, she noted, several further details that her cataloguing had not yet fully processed. She took them in order.
The floor was of worn wooden planks, and the wear-patterns told a story of their own. There was a clear path from the cottage door to the hearth, worn by the passage of a man who must have walked that path perhaps forty thousand times across a span of many decades. There was a second clear path from the hearth to the northern shelves, where the defensive-working ingredients had been kept, also heavily worn. There was a third path — and this was the detail that, when she noticed it, produced the first small sharpening of her breath — a third path that ran from a small door in the back of the parlor, a door she had not at first observed because it was painted the same gray as the walls and was set flush with the wall’s surface, to a specific point on the eastern shelf, and the specific point was occupied by the three small boxes that had been moved most recently. The third path was not worn with decades of use. The third path was worn in its early stages — the segment nearest the small door was a faint groove — but the segment nearest the shelves had the brighter quality of very recent use, perhaps within the past ten days. A path that shows older wear at its start and fresher wear at its end is a path that had once been walked rarely and has, in the recent past, been walked frequently. Pell had begun, within the last ten days, to make many more trips from whatever room lay behind the small gray door to the three small boxes on the eastern shelf than he had made in the decades before.
What lay behind the small gray door, she did not know. She could not know without asking, or without investigating, and she would not do either tonight. But she could deduce, from the pattern of the path and from the recent drawdown of the defensive ingredients and from the recent movement of the three small boxes, that Pell had, within the last ten days, undertaken a particular intensive project whose components required regular trips between that back room and those three boxes. This was a project begun recently. The timing was close enough to the party’s own journey to suggest, if not to prove, a connection between the project and the party’s imminent arrival.
She took a sip of her cooling violet tea. She permitted no expression to cross her face. The conversation at the hearth continued: Pell was speaking of the Silent Witness’s dormant state, and of the century or two until its awakening, and of the nature of the specters, and she listened to his words with the sixty percent of her attention that was allocated to them, and she tracked his cadence and intonation for any variation that might indicate deception, and she found none. He was speaking truthfully, so far as she could judge, about what he knew of the Vale. He was also, so far as she could judge, withholding something. She had known, within about twenty minutes of his beginning to speak, that he was withholding something, and her cataloguing had now, at approximately the ninety-minute mark, begun to give her a working hypothesis about what the withholding might concern.
She moved her eyes next to the writing desk tucked into the corner beside the window. It was a small desk of the same dark-grained cedar as the boxes, with a hinged lid that opened to expose the writing surface and closed flat to serve as a display shelf for two items she could see from where she sat. The two items were a small silver candlestick, unlit, with a fresh taper of beeswax that had been recently trimmed; and a small framed oval — three inches by perhaps four — turned toward the wall so that she could not see what the frame contained. The framed oval was not dusty. The surface from which she would expect dust to accumulate on a turned-away frame — the back of the frame, now facing outward — showed no dust. Someone had, very recently, either turned the frame or wiped the back of it. A small object turned to face a wall, and recently touched, is a small object that its owner has been handling. The owner, presumably Pell, had been taking it up to look at, and then replacing it to face the wall so he would not have to look at it the rest of the time. She understood the behavior. She had done it herself, with a similar small framed object, in her youth.
The candlestick was more interesting than it first appeared. Beeswax tapers did not trim themselves. The trimming of a taper meant that someone had lit it, burned it for some while, and then extinguished it and trimmed the remaining wick so that the next lighting would be clean. The trim was very fresh — the cut showed no oxidation, no darkening. The candle had been trimmed that morning or the night before. A candle trimmed that recently on a desk at which one performs one’s serious writing is a candle that has been used for serious writing in the very recent past. She glanced, with the smallest permissible motion of her eyes, at the hinged lid of the desk. There, just barely visible along the lid’s hairline seam, was the faint ink-shadow of a piece of paper that had recently been closed into the desk with its edge protruding slightly, then pressed down by the lid. An ink-shadow is produced when the edge of a wet-inked page is clamped against the underside of a lid before the ink has fully dried. Pell had been writing, at this desk, within the last twelve hours, and the writing had been substantial enough to produce wet-ink shadow-marks, and he had then closed the desk on the still-drying writing rather than waiting for it to dry properly. This was the behavior of a man who had been writing something quickly and had needed to conceal it quickly when he heard the party approaching through the grove.
What had Pell been writing, quickly, in the hours before the party arrived? She could not know. But the pattern was consistent with a man preparing a document — or several documents — for imminent delivery.
She moved on.
The ceiling. The ceiling was exposed-beam, as Aldric would record, of beech, and in the rafters between the beams there were, upon close unhurried inspection, small bundles of herbs hanging to dry, bound with twine. She counted the bundles. There were forty-seven. She could read, from her chair, the plants: lavender, rosemary, sage, thyme, two species of mint, hyssop, vervain, angelica, meadowsweet, yarrow, and several others she could not identify at distance. The bundles were of mixed age — some recently hung, with the fresh green of the current season still vivid; others aged into the silver-gray of two or three seasons past; a few, in the far corner of the ceiling, fully dried to brown and almost crumbling. The dried-to-brown bundles had not been replaced. This meant Pell had, at some point in the past, been diligent about his herb-rotation, and had subsequently stopped being diligent. The aged bundles were clustered in the corner of the ceiling nearest the small back door — the door that led to the newly-trafficked path. Whatever had taken Pell’s attention away from herb-rotation had taken it in the direction of that back door.
The kettle was next. It stood on a small iron trivet beside the hearth. The kettle was of a pale glazed ceramic that she associated with the northern tea-academies, and the trivet was of fine ironwork, possibly of elven manufacture, though she could not verify this at the distance. The kettle had been, when she entered, gently steaming; it was now barely warmer than room temperature, which meant approximately an hour and twenty minutes had elapsed since it had been set upon the trivet — an interval consistent with her own mental clock. The ceramic had a single hairline crack along its rim, visible as a darker line in the glaze. A crack in a kettle is evidence of a moment of impact or thermal shock. The crack on this kettle was of the hairline sort that results from a kettle being set down too hard upon a stone surface in a moment of agitation, and the agitation-crack on this kettle had the color of the ceramic’s underclay showing through, which meant the crack was of some years’ standing. Pell had, at some point, set this kettle down upon his stone hearth with sufficient force to crack its rim. Pell did not, however, appear to be a man given to casual rages. The crack, then, was the signature of a specific moment of great emotion, preserved on the kettle ever since. The kettle was old and had been used for many thousands of pots of tea. It had not been replaced, despite the crack. A man who does not replace a cracked kettle that could be easily replaced is a man who keeps the kettle because the crack itself is part of why he keeps it. This was, she judged, a further private memorial, of a different kind than the tapestry.
The kettle and the tapestry and the framed oval turned to the wall and the recently-used back door and the recently-trimmed candle and the recently-closed desk and the recently-moved boxes and the recently-drawn-down defensive ingredients and the recently-walked back path — all of these, taken together, formed a pattern she had now fully assembled, and she settled back into her chair very slightly and permitted herself, in the inner court, to acknowledge that the pattern was complete and to state the pattern to herself in the precise terms her training required.
The pattern was this. Pell had loved someone. Pell had loved someone for a very long time. That person was associated with the Vale — the tapestry commemorated a visit, or a ceremony, at the Vale’s central structure. The tapestry was two to three hundred years old. The person was therefore lost or long-absent, for at least that span, which meant Pell’s grief had been long-held and long-disciplined. But the grief had, for most of those centuries, been settled — the herbs had been rotated, the paths to the back room had not been walked, the defensive ingredients had not been depleted. Something had changed, and changed recently, within the last ten days. Something had recalled the grief to its acute phase. Something had caused Pell to begin walking again the back path he had not walked in decades, to retrieve three small boxes he had not retrieved, to draw down his defensive stocks, to light his candle and write urgently in his desk, to handle the framed oval and replace it face-to-wall, to crack his routine.
What, within the last ten days, had changed? The party’s imminent arrival had been known to Pell, by his own testimony, for some while — the silver-wire bird had delivered regular reports. But she suspected, now, that the arrival of the party was not the only precipitating event. She suspected that something had happened in the Vale itself within the last ten days that had registered, through some channel Pell possessed, and had compelled him to reopen the acute project he had long held in abeyance.
She had, by this point in her cataloguing, formed the working hypothesis that would anchor the rest of her thinking about Pell. The hypothesis was this: Pell had loved someone who had either been a contributor to the Silent Witness before its binding, whose consciousness therefore persisted as one of the ambient fragments among the specters, or someone who had, more recently, somehow been lost to the Vale — drawn into it, consumed by it, bound by it, absorbed by it in some way she could not yet determine. The tapestry’s date was ambiguous: it might depict a very old event preserved in a newer weaving, or a newer event preserved in a tapestry that had been commissioned in conventional style. The framed oval’s recency-of-handling suggested the loss was still processing itself in Pell, which was consistent either with a very-long-held grief newly re-activated, or with a fresh loss. The drawdown of defensive ingredients suggested Pell had been, recently, fighting something, or preparing to fight something, or had lost a fight recently and was preparing not to lose the next one.
She weighted the two possibilities. The tapestry’s fading suggested the greater age; the acute behaviors of the last ten days suggested the newer loss. The most parsimonious reconciliation was that Pell had lost someone to the Vale long ago, had carried the loss in its chronic phase for two to three centuries, and had, within the last ten days, received news that the lost person’s condition had changed — had become reachable, or had become endangered, or had become detectable. The Silent Witness had begun to stir in the last decade, by Pell’s own testimony; it had probably begun to stir audibly in the last ten days, and Pell’s lost person — if a contributor or an absorbed soul — had accordingly begun to stir also, becoming perceptible to Pell for the first time in centuries.
This hypothesis, once formulated, clarified many things. It clarified why Pell was more motivated in this matter than his presented disinterested-academic stance suggested. It clarified why Pell’s recommendation that the party refuse all bindings and let the Witness wake was not, for him, a neutral philosophical position; he had personal stake in the Witness’s awakening, because his lost person was likely to be among the ambient fragments and might, upon the Witness’s full reconstitution, be recoverable. It clarified why Pell had set out a fifth cup before the party arrived — the fifth cup was not, as Aldric had later suspected, for Tobin specifically, but for anyone who might prove to be the party’s ally; Pell had hoped, in the setting of the fifth cup, that the fifth member would be a convert to his cause rather than a wasted motion. It clarified, above all, why Pell had the resources of refuge and letters and tokens to offer the party — he had been preparing these offerings for weeks, perhaps months, against the possibility that a party of the right disposition might finally arrive to do the work he had been seeding across generations.
She took another sip of her tea. The cup was cool now. She did not mind.
She understood, at this point in her cataloguing, approximately ninety-five percent of what she would come to understand about Pell by the end of her acquaintance with him, and she understood it without his having told her any of it directly. This was the ordinary product of her trained attention. It was not a gift. It was a craft. She had spent nearly twenty years developing the craft, and she did not often permit herself to take private satisfaction in its exercise, but in the hour at Pell’s hearth she took a small permitted satisfaction, because the case was an interesting one and Pell was an interesting subject. It is not every day that one has an opportunity to catalogue the parlor of a man who has been seeding a cross-generational intervention in the succession of a bound god.
The conversation at the hearth turned, over the subsequent half hour, through the several matters Aldric would later record. She followed these with the sixty percent of her attention allocated to them, and she contributed at the appropriate moments — her procedural question about the consequences of refusing both rituals, her acknowledgment of the arrangement with the terminal “Aye” — and she performed these contributions in the register of a woman fully present to the conversation, which she was, mostly, but which she also was not. The remainder of her attention continued, throughout, its cataloguing.
The small back door at some point opened a crack. She saw the crack from the corner of her eye, across the edge of the cup at her lips. Through the crack she glimpsed, for less than a second, a thin strip of a different kind of room: pale stone walls, a brighter light than the parlor’s, and what appeared to be the edge of a heavy wooden table with something reflective set upon it. The crack closed almost at once — it was, she judged, either the wind of the parlor’s airflow or a small habit of the door that did not latch fully. She did not remark upon the glimpse to anyone. She filed it. She now had, in addition to her earlier data, a visual confirmation that the room behind the door was stone-walled, brighter-lit, and contained a table with reflective equipment. It was, she suspected, a scrying chamber, or a divination workroom, or both. A scrying chamber trafficked heavily in the last ten days by a man preparing to perform intensive long-distance observation. This was further confirmation of her hypothesis.
The party’s conversation turned to the practical matters of tomorrow — food, water, letters, tokens — and she noted Pell’s voice during the enumeration of these matters. His voice was steady and warm; he was giving genuine aid; he was also, she registered, slightly relieved. A man giving aid to allies is often slightly relieved at finally being able to give the aid he has been preparing. Pell’s preparations were now unlocking their dispersal, and the dispersal itself was a small relief to him.
Then Pell stood and invited Tobin to walk in the grove. Tobin rose. The two of them departed.
In the quiet that followed their departure, Seraphine allowed her cataloguing to close its formal register. She had, by this point, approximately ten minutes of clarity remaining from the violet tea, and she was going to spend those ten minutes in the final consolidation of her conclusions, because she had learned that consolidation performed while the tea’s effect was still in play was considerably more durable than consolidation performed afterward.
She consolidated.
First consolidation: Pell was trustworthy in the matter of the Silent Witness’s nature and in his stated preferences concerning its awakening. He had deep personal motivation for those preferences, but the motivation was consistent with, rather than contrary to, the party’s own emerging inclinations. An ally whose personal stake aligns with the party’s strategic interest is a stronger ally than one whose alignment is purely philosophical, because personal stake survives philosophical persuasion against it.
Second consolidation: Pell’s personal stake involved a lost person in the Vale, almost certainly a contributor whose consciousness persisted among the ambient fragments, and Pell had been preparing, for the decade of the Witness’s stirring and the last ten days especially intensively, for an attempted recovery of that person upon the Witness’s awakening. This meant Pell would not merely be offering the party refuge and resources as a neutral gesture; Pell would want a relationship of ongoing coordination, because the party’s actions at the Vale would directly affect the fate of the contributor-fragments and therefore of Pell’s lost person. The party should understand this and should structure its relationship with Pell accordingly.
Third consolidation: Pell’s relationship with Tobin was old, and deep, and was the most important strategic asset of the party at this hour. Pell trusted Tobin. Tobin trusted Pell. The “three prior times” remark had confirmed that Tobin and Pell were the twin anchors of a longer intervention that had been running across generations, and that Tobin’s presence in the party was not accidental, though he had worn the accident well. She would need to ask Tobin, privately, at some later opportunity, about the depth of his own stake in this matter. She suspected it was considerable. She also suspected, on reflection, that Tobin’s stake might include a lost person of his own, though she had no direct evidence of this and would not speculate further until she had evidence.
Fourth consolidation: the small back door and its trafficked path and its scrying chamber were the key to Pell’s operational capacity. If the party ever needed to contact Pell across distance, the scrying chamber was the instrument. She would ask, before departure tomorrow, whether Pell could provide a means of two-way contact through the scrying apparatus, perhaps via one of the tokens he had promised.
Fifth consolidation: the tapestry and the framed oval and the cracked kettle were the signs of Pell’s private grief, and they were not to be spoken of. One did not remark upon such things. One did not ask. One simply noticed them, incorporated them into one’s understanding of the man, and did not use the knowledge as a lever. This was the mark of her particular professional discipline. She had seen colleagues — she had seen more than one colleague in her years of this work — destroy themselves by using personal pain as a lever. Pain was not a lever. Pain was data. One did not lever a man one was in alliance with; one learned his pain so one could step around it, not pull it.
Sixth and final consolidation: her feeling about Pell had shifted, over the ninety minutes of her cataloguing, from the initial professional assessment to a different register which she now permitted herself to name, because naming it was part of consolidating it. She had moved, in the course of the evening, from detached professional pity — the pity one feels at encountering a stranger’s grief one has deduced without his volunteering it — to something that was not yet friendship, for Seraphine did not move into friendship in a single evening, but that she might properly term the beginning of trust. She trusted Pell, as she had trusted very few people in her life before. She trusted him because his grief had aligned with his intellect and his ethic, because the three had not been warring in him, because he had done the long work of grief-conversion that she had herself attempted and only partially accomplished, and because a man who has converted his grief into forty years of disciplined scholarship is a man whose word can be relied upon, because his word has been tested against a pressure most men would have broken under.
She took the last sip of her violet tea. The tonic’s clarity faded with the last of the liquid. Her mind settled back into its ordinary sharpness, which was sharp enough for most purposes.
She looked around the parlor one more time, at leisure, now that her cataloguing was complete. She looked at the fire that burned without fuel. She looked at the shelves of books in four alphabets. She looked at the forty-six jars and the twenty-one earthenware vessels, half of them full, half of them drawn down. She looked at the ceiling where forty-seven bundles of herbs hung in their varying ages of drying. She looked at the writing desk with its recently-trimmed candle and its recently-closed lid and its framed oval turned to the wall. She looked at the cracked kettle still warm upon its trivet. She looked at the small gray door behind which lay the scrying chamber and Pell’s longer grief. She looked, finally and most carefully, at the tapestry, and she understood now, in the longer look, the pale robe of the other figure. The pale robe was not white or ivory. It had been, originally, a silver-gray so light that the weaving had registered it as near-white but had preserved, in the hem and cuffs, the faint wash of silvering. The figure had been a woman in a silver-gray robe with faint silver threading at the hem. The silver-gray robe was the garb of a particular ceremonial office within the lost civilization of the Vale — the office of the Attendant of the Silent Witness, a position held by a single individual at a time, who served as the interface between the Witness and the civilization that had built it. The office had not existed for eight thousand years. It had been held, in the final century before the binding, by a small series of women.
Pell had loved the last Attendant of the Silent Witness. The last Attendant had been a contributor to the Witness’s integrated mind. The Witness’s binding had therefore been Pell’s lover’s binding. And Pell had been waiting, for eight thousand years — or for the two to three centuries of his present incarnation, which was one of several he had almost certainly lived — for the moment at which the binding would decay enough to permit his lover’s consciousness to be recovered.
The violet tea was gone. Her clarity was gone. But the conclusion held. She had arrived at it through the long slow cataloguing, and it did not require tonic clarity to stand.
She set her cup down on the small side-table beside her chair. She folded her hands in her lap. She permitted her expression to register, for the first time in an hour and a half, a very small change, which was a softening of the muscles around her mouth — the softening that, in her private interior lexicon, corresponded to a mental bow.
She bowed, inwardly, to Pell.
She bowed to his grief. She bowed to his discipline. She bowed to his patience. She bowed to the eight thousand or three hundred years of his waiting, whichever it was. She bowed to the tapestry and to the cracked kettle and to the framed oval and to the cupboard of candles and to the herbs aged into brown in the far corner. She bowed to the woman in the silver-gray robe at the center of the weaving.
She did not bow with her body. She did not bow with her face. She bowed only in the interior court where such bows were registered, and where she had bowed, across the years, only to a very small number of persons, and where she was pleased, this evening, to add one more name to the ledger.
From this moment, she resolved, her alliance with Pell was not the provisional alliance of a party receiving aid from a helpful mage. It was, in her private accounting, something considerably more: a shared interest that placed them on the same side of a longer struggle than the party’s present quest. She would treat him henceforth as a co-principal in a matter that transcended the party’s particular decision about the binding ritual. The party would decide what to do at the Vale. She, Seraphine, would decide what to do about Pell across the rest of her life, and her decision was that Pell was now on her short list of persons for whom, if the need arose, she would reorient her own long-term priorities.
This was not a decision she had made often. She had made it, in her adult life, perhaps four times, not counting the members of her present party. It was a significant decision. It placed Pell in a private category that her training had taught her to guard carefully against over-expansion. But the cataloguing had earned Pell the category, and she would not go back on the cataloguing now.
Across the parlor, Aldric was writing in his tome by the unfuelled firelight. Ysolde was sitting with her knees drawn up, looking into the fire with the still expression of a woman sorting a heavy day into its appropriate drawers. Balthazar was rocking gently in the rocking chair, his eyes half-closed, muttering something under his breath so faintly that she could not make it out from her chair.
She crossed to the window and looked out into the grove. The evening had deepened to the soft blue-green of an enchanted wood’s twilight. In the far corner of the grove, two figures stood close together, Pell’s hand still on Tobin’s shoulder, Tobin’s hand still on Pell’s. They were no longer speaking. They were simply standing. She watched them for perhaps ten seconds, and then she turned away, because it was not for her to watch the completion of whatever exchange was occurring between them.
She returned to her chair. She sat. She folded her hands again. She closed her eyes, briefly, not to sleep, but to run one final inventory, which was an inventory of her own state.
She was calm. She was alert, though tired. She was in no significant physical discomfort. Her small wound from the engagement on the trail the day before, a shallow scrape on her left forearm received when the blade had grazed her during his final lunge, was healing cleanly. She was well-fed. She was warm. She was in the company of four persons whose trustworthiness had, in the course of the journey, been confirmed to her own high standards; and she was in the temporary company of a fifth person, who had now been promoted, in her private accounting, to a standing considerably higher than temporary.
She had arrived, without realizing she had been traveling toward it, at a condition she had rarely achieved during her professional life, and which she had begun to believe was no longer available to her. She was at peace, in a strategic sense. She had, for the first time in many years, a table around which she could sit and, in sitting, feel that the table was the right table. She had, also for the first time in many years, a clear long-term project whose objective aligned with her own emerging sense of what constituted good work. She had, finally, the unexpected pleasure of discovering that the project came attached to a man — Pell — who had been doing the same work she would have wished, if she had known it was available, to have been doing, for longer than she had been alive.
It is not every evening that a woman in the middle of her life is granted the gift of discovering that the work she was born to do has been waiting for her at the edge of an enchanted wood in the parlor of a reclusive mage whose grief aligns with hers in ways neither of them has yet named aloud and both of them understand.
She opened her eyes. Aldric was still writing. Ysolde was still looking into the fire. Balthazar was still muttering. The grove outside was dimming to its evening.
She permitted herself, in the interior court, one more small private thing. She permitted herself a small smile. Not for anyone. Not visible. Just for her.
Then she rose, crossed to the small table by the hearth, and lifted the kettle with its cracked rim, and poured herself a second cup of the violet tea — which had, despite having sat for an hour and a half, retained some considerable portion of its warmth, because the tonic had properties of heat-retention she did not fully understand and did not need to. She carried the cup back to her chair. She sat. She drank. The clarity returned, faintly, and she used the faint clarity to begin composing, in her mind, the list of questions she would need to ask Pell before departure tomorrow. There were eleven questions. She organized them by priority.
Outside the window, the two figures in the grove turned and began, slowly, to walk back toward the cottage. Tobin’s kettle, which he had left inside, was still sitting on the floor beside his low stool, and she noticed, as they approached, that Tobin was walking just slightly more upright than he had been when they departed, and that Pell’s hand was no longer on Tobin’s shoulder, and that the slight forward inclination of both their bodies toward each other, which is the physical signature of two old friends who are still in the middle of a difficult conversation, had relaxed into the posture of two friends who had, for now, finished their conversation and were content to walk the rest of the way in the quiet.
She watched them come. She did not permit her face to register anything. She did not smile at them when they entered. She did not need to. She merely looked at Pell, once, across the room, for the briefest possible moment, and Pell, catching her glance, returned it, and in the exchange of the single glance an agreement was concluded between them that would hold for the remainder of their association, whatever shape that association took in the years to come.
The agreement was simple. It was not put into words. It was not put into gestures. It was simply this: each of them had recognized, in the other, the work each had been doing, and each had silently pledged to the other the full weight of their capacity in support of the other’s completion of the work, for as long as both of them remained capable of the support.
This was, in the language she had learned in her earliest years, a pact.
She nodded, almost imperceptibly, at Pell. He nodded back, just as imperceptibly. Neither of them said anything.
Pell crossed to the kitchen alcove and began to lay out supper. Tobin took his low stool again beside the hearth. Aldric closed his tome at last. Ysolde stretched and rolled her shoulders. Balthazar stopped rocking and opened his eyes fully and muttered, “Balthazar smells bread.”
Supper was served. They ate. They spoke of small things. The enchanted wood grew dark beyond the window. The fire in the hearth continued to burn without fuel, steady, warm, and entirely silent.
Seraphine ate her bread and her soup and her small wedge of the cheese that tasted faintly of goat, and she did so with the composed attention of a woman to whom the evening had delivered an unexpected gift and who intended to spend no part of the evening failing to appreciate it. She did not speak much. She did not need to. Her cataloguing was complete. Her pact was concluded. Her list of questions was organized. Her short list of persons had gained one more name.
Tomorrow the party would ride on. Tomorrow the final days of approach to the Vale would begin. Tomorrow the questions of the ritual and the refusal and the awakening would pass from the abstract register of after-supper discussion into the concrete register of practical preparation. Tomorrow she would ask Pell her eleven questions, and he would answer them, and the answers would shape the final form of the party’s plan.
Tonight, though, tonight was for the quiet. Tonight was for the appreciation. Tonight was for the private interior registration of the fact that a woman who had come to the enchanted wood expecting to conduct a difficult mission in difficult company had found, instead, that the mission had opened into a larger mission, and the company had opened into a larger company, and the larger mission and the larger company were both things she was, to her own considerable surprise, glad to have been drawn into.
She finished her soup. She set her bowl down. She permitted herself one further private smile — a smaller one this time, almost entirely interior — and she watched the fire in the hearth burn steadily on, and she thought, in the precise wording she had been taught in her earliest training:
This is the work.
Segment 13: The Leaving of the Greenwood
Och, reader, I must warn ye at the outset that this tellin’ is goin’ to be shorter than some I’ve given ye, and not because the hours of it were few — the hours were many, the whole of a long slow day between the sleeper’s rising and the evenin’ settin’ in — but because the feelin’ of it was one of those feelings that a body does not fully understand while it is happenin’, and only comes to understand later, when the feelin’ has had time to unpack itself in the heart. I will tell ye as much of it as I can tell honest, and where I canna tell honest, I will leave a wee gap, and ye will have to fill the gap yourself out of whatever lives ye have lived. That is the bargain between the teller and the heard, and I have never cheated on the bargain yet, and I will not start tonight.
We left Pell’s grove in the cool first hour after dawn, the way ye leave the house of a body ye ken ye may not see again in this life, which is to say, ye leave slowly, and ye take one last look at each room as ye pass it, and ye say goodbye to the kettle and the hearth and the door-latch, each in turn, under your breath, in the small foolish private way ye say such goodbyes, because if ye said them aloud ye would feel daft, and yet the saying of them, even silent, is part of what the heart requires when a house has been kind to ye. Pell’s house had been kind to us. The stone walls of it, grown out of the earth by some old Vale-magic that I dinna pretend to understand, had kept us warm and safe through the one long night we had slept there. The fuel-less fire in the hearth had burned steady all through the darkness. The violet tea had, I ken, done somethin’ to each of us, whether we noticed it or no, and had opened certain rooms in our minds that might not have opened on their own. The small stone table where we had taken the supper the night before, and where we had taken the breakfast this morning — a breakfast of hot oat porridge and honeyed nuts and a sharp aged cheese Pell said he’d been saving for a proper occasion — that table had held, for the one set of meals that it had held us, the weight of five souls and one mage and more old friendship between Tobin and Pell than my young mind was prepared to measure. I had said goodbye to the table in my mind as I rose from it. I said goodbye to the cracked kettle. I said goodbye to the rocking chair where Balthazar had sat with such an odd quiet face the night before. I said goodbye, in particular, to the faded tapestry behind the hearth, which I had seen Seraphine looking at for a long wordless moment the night previous, and which I now understood, in that way ye understand a thing without bein’ told, to contain a story I did not ken the shape of but which Seraphine had kenned, and which Pell had kenned, and which Tobin had kenned, and which I would, in good time, when the three of them decided I was ready, be told.
Pell himself walked us to the edge of his grove, and he carried the small cloth bag of tokens he had promised, and he gave one to each of us as we passed through the grove’s boundary, and the givings were a ceremony of sorts, though Pell did it without makin’ a ceremony of it. He gave to Brother Aldric a small silver pen that Aldric turned over once in his hand and then tucked into his inner pocket with the expression of a scholar who had been given the correct gift for the first time in his life. He gave to Balthazar a small flat stone of a pale green color, which Balthazar looked at for a moment and then slipped into the pocket of his coat with a gruff nod that told me Balthazar had recognized the stone for what it was though I had not. He gave to Seraphine a small dark glass vial, stoppered with a wee bit of silver wire, and Seraphine took it in her palm and looked at it for two seconds and then at Pell for one second, and the look between them was the look of two people finishing a conversation they had been having privately since the previous evening, and she closed her hand over the vial and inclined her head and said, quietly, “Thank you,” which from Seraphine was equivalent to a vow. He gave to Tobin — and I watched this particular giving, because it was the most curious — a small piece of folded vellum, tied with a thread of ordinary white cotton, and Tobin did not open the vellum, only nodded at Pell and slipped it into his inner coat, and Pell nodded back, and I felt, standin’ to one side, that a thing had just been transferred between them that belonged neither to the rest of us nor to the grove nor to the day’s weather but to the two of them alone, and I did not ask about it, because a body does not ask about such transfers when the transfer has just happened, and perhaps not ever.
Pell gave to me last. He held out in his palm a small braided circle of what looked like dried grass but which, when I took it, felt warmer in my hand than dried grass ought to be, and soft in a way that was closer to the soft of a living bird’s down than to the soft of any plant I had handled. It was a small circlet, perhaps two inches across, the size ye could slip over a finger if ye had a finger of unusual size, or that ye could keep in a pocket and rub your thumb against in an idle moment. Pell said, quiet, so that only I could hear him, “When the wood is with you, lass, this will warm in your pocket. When the wood has nothing more to say, it will cool. Keep it by you. You will know, better than any of us, what the wood wishes you to know at any given hour.”
I did not ken what to say to him. I am not often at a loss for what to say, reader, as ye have likely noticed by now, but I was at a loss then. I took the braided circlet, and I put it into the small inner pouch I keep at my breast where I carry the things I value most, and I looked at Pell, and I tried to thank him, and what came out of my mouth was not “thank ye” but something queer and half-choked and bairn-like, which I will not write down here because I have my dignity. Pell, bless him, took whatever I said as a thank-ye, and he smiled, the small mage-smile he had, and he put his hand on my shoulder the way a body will do when they have accepted a thank-ye that did not come out quite right, and he said, “You have a good whistle, Ysolde Kerrigan. The wood will miss you. Listen for what else misses you as you go.”
Those were his last words to me. He withdrew his hand. He stepped back from the grove’s edge. Tobin and Pell exchanged a look, silent, the kind of look that two old friends exchange when a final parting has been performed, and I saw Tobin’s jaw work for a moment, the way Tobin’s jaw works when he is mastering something in himself, and then Tobin nodded to Pell, and Pell nodded back, and we turned, all five of us, and we walked out of the grove, back along the half-day’s path we had walked in on, and we did not look back, though I confess I wanted to.
I must tell ye, reader, that the walk back along the footpath that day was already a different walk than the walk in. We had come in the day before stranger to the grove, and we left it the day after with the grove a known and loved thing behind us, and the difference made the path feel both shorter and longer, in the way a known path always feels both shorter and longer than an unknown one, because the known path is friendlier to the feet but heavier on the heart. I led as usual, with Muirne on a loose rein at my shoulder — we were walkin’ rather than ridin’ for the first stretch, because the horses wanted stretchin’ after a day and a night at tether — and the others followed in their usual order, and we walked mostly in a comfortable quiet, because nobody had the right word for what had happened in Pell’s cottage the night before, and none of us needed to reach for a wrong word to fill the quiet. The enchanted wood around us received us back with the familiar quality of receivin’ that it had shown since we had first entered it, which was to say that the silver-wire bird sang once as we walked, a short phrase of greeting, and I whistled a short phrase of greeting back, and neither of us extended the exchange because we were both walkin’ on our own business.
We reached the horses at the tether-place at about noon. The horses were well — Ysolde-well, which is to say, they had been watered by the small wee stream nearby and had grazed the patch I had left them in down to a friendly half-munched level and had not been harmed by any passing beast. I praised them. I brushed them. The others busied themselves with the packing of gear and the re-strapping of saddlebags, which Balthazar was particularly careful about because Balthazar is always particularly careful about the re-strapping of saddlebags, and we took our midday meal standin’ by the horses — a cold meal of bread and cheese and the last of Pell’s honey-nuts — and we mounted up, and we rode.
And here, reader, is where the tellin’ of this day begins in earnest, because the ridin’ west from the tether-place was different in its quality from any ridin’ we had yet done on this journey, and I want to give that difference its proper weight.
The wood had been thinning, as Aldric had noted in his own careful scholar’s way the day before, for perhaps a hundred miles of our passage through it. The canopy had gone from five layers to four, from four to three, from three to two, and by the afternoon of this day it was down to one broad weave of higher branches that let a great deal more sun through to the forest floor than any canopy we had yet seen. The air grew lighter. The colors of the wood, which had been all greens in their various deep registers, began to admit yellow and russet and the occasional flash of red where some smaller tree had decided to turn early toward autumn. The undergrowth changed. The dense ferns and mossy carpets of the deeper wood gave way to rougher grasses, to low wiry shrubs with prickly leaves, to patches of bare earth where nothing grew. The hoofbeats of the horses, which had been muffled by leaf-mold for so many days, began to make a more ordinary sound — the clip of hoof on hard-packed dirt, the occasional clang of hoof on stone where a buried rock broke through. Muirne, who had been walking with the slow attentive step of a mare in enchanted country, began to walk with the brisker step of a mare on familiar ordinary ground. I did not stop her. I let her take the new pace.
And that is how I came to understand, reader, about an hour into the afternoon’s ride, that we were leavin’ the wood.
I mean, of course I had kenned for days that we were approachin’ the wood’s western edge. Aldric’s map had told us so. Pell had confirmed it. My own scout’s eyes had read the signs of the thinning. But there is a difference, reader, between knowin’ a thing with your head and feelin’ it with your chest, and the feelin’ of it with my chest came upon me that afternoon, and it came, as such feelings tend to come, without warning.
It began with the braided circlet in my pouch. I had been feelin’ it, warm against my breastbone, for the whole of the ride since we left Pell’s grove. I had not been puttin’ my attention on the warmth because the warmth had simply been there, steady as a heartbeat, a wee small persistent reminder that the wood was with me. And then, about an hour into the afternoon, I felt the warmth change. It did not go cold. It went cooler. Not cold. Cooler. A wee shade less warm than it had been.
I reined Muirne in a breath. I put my hand to the pouch. I pressed my palm against it. Cooler. Definitely cooler.
Pell’s words came back to me. When the wood is with you, this will warm. When the wood has nothing more to say, it will cool.
The wood was beginning to take its leave of me.
Reader, I will tell ye, that wee cooling against my breastbone did a thing to me that I had not expected, and which I will spend the rest of this tellin’ tryin’ to describe. It did not make me afraid. It did not make me angry. It made me — oh, I am reachin’ for the word and canna quite find it — it made me feel the way a bairn feels when a beloved grandmother has stood at the door of the croft to watch the bairn walk away down the lane for the first time alone, and the bairn ken’s without lookin’ back that the grandmother is still at the door, and ken’s also that at some particular step in the walkin’ the grandmother will go back inside, and the bairn cannot tell when that step will come, and each step the bairn takes down the lane is a step closer to the moment when the grandmother goes in, and the bairn keeps walkin’ because the bairn has been tellt to be brave and keep walkin’, and the bairn will not look back because lookin’ back is a thing a brave bairn does not do, and yet in the bairn’s chest there is a wee hollow growin’ that will, when the grandmother finally goes inside, become a whole kind of loneliness the bairn had not kenned could exist.
That was the feelin’, reader. That was it exact. I was the bairn. The wood was the grandmother. The cooling circlet at my breast was the step of the walking. And I was walkin’ down the lane, and I would not look back, and the wee hollow was growin’.
I did not say anything to the others. I kept Muirne walkin’. The trees grew thinner still. The canopy broke into patches. The sky, reader — the sky, which I had not seen properly in eight days, began to appear in broad patches overhead, blue and gold with the westerin’ afternoon light, and my whole face lifted to it in involuntary greeting, and at the same time my chest clenched in involuntary grief, because the sky appearin’ meant the wood receding, and I could not have the one without losin’ the other.
I heard, somewhere far behind us now, the silver-wire bird sing once.
I almost did not whistle back. Almost. For a wee breath, I thought — if I do not answer, perhaps the conversation will not be finished. Perhaps the wood will keep me a while longer. Perhaps the grandmother will stand at the door a little longer if the bairn lingers in the lane.
But I am a scout, reader, and a scout does not practice that kind of wishful thinkin’. A scout answers a farewell. I put my fingers to my lips, and I whistled back the short phrase — the two-note farewell, a fifth apart, descending — that I had whistled at our first entry and that the silver-wire bird had sung to me on that first afternoon. I whistled it clear and true and steady. I did not sob into it, though my throat wanted to. I held the note proper.
The silver-wire bird did not sing again. It had said its goodbye. It had accepted mine. The conversation was closed.
The circlet at my breast went cooler still. Not cold. Cooler. It had about a quarter of its warmth left.
We rode on. I heard Tobin, behind me, clear his throat in the particular quiet way he clears his throat when he has noticed somethin’ and is not yet speakin’ of it. I did not turn my head. I ken’d Tobin had heard the silver-wire bird’s farewell and my answering, and I ken’d that Tobin, of all of them, understood best what was happenin’ in my chest at that moment, because Tobin had, I now suspected, heard a great many such farewells in his longer-than-he-admitted life. I was grateful to Tobin for not speakin’. A grandfather knows when not to speak.
The trees thinned further. We passed, within the next half-hour, the last stand of the proper enchanted greenwood, and we came into a stretch of transitional country where the trees were real trees — oaks and beeches and a few pines — but they were sparse trees, scattered across a rough meadow, and they were no longer whispering to each other in the slow old breath the enchanted wood had been whispering since our entry. These were just trees. They were doing what ordinary trees do, which is to stand quietly and grow slowly and not hold any conversations with any passing lass with a good whistle. The silver-wire bird was not in any of them. None of them had the quality the enchanted trees had had, of being the visible part of somethin’ larger. They were simply trees. Trees ye could have found in any of the ordinary woods I had ridden through in my thirty-odd years. Good trees. Honest trees. But not wondering trees. Not listening trees.
The circlet at my breast was now barely warmer than my own skin.
We rode across the meadow. The meadow gave way to a long shallow slope downward. At the bottom of the slope, perhaps a mile further on, the last scattered trees stopped altogether, and beyond them began a country of an entirely different character, which I had not seen for more than a week, and which I recognized with a small prick in the eye.
Open country. Proper open country. Hills without trees. Grass without canopy. The whole horizon laid bare to the sky. The great blue dome of afternoon stretching from one edge of the world to the other, unbroken by any leaf. And the wind — reader, the wind. I had not heard proper wind in eight days. The enchanted wood had had its own kind of wind, a slow breath-wind that moved among the canopies without ever reaching the forest floor with any weight. But now, as we came down the slope, a proper wind began to blow in off the open country — a steady westerly wind, warm with the afternoon sun, smelling of grass and distant hills and the faint dry mineral smell of the barren land beyond — and the wind hit my face and my hair and my cloak and my horse’s mane, and every one of them lifted in it, and I laughed, reader, I laughed aloud, because the wind was a glad thing and a glad thing deserves a laugh, and at the same time I felt the circlet at my breast go from cooler to cool, the last of its warmth leaving it in the space of perhaps thirty seconds, and by the time the wind had settled all of us into the new ride of open country the circlet was as cool as an ordinary bit of dried grass tucked into an inner pouch, and the wood had, in that wee half-minute of my laughing at the wind, gone inside and closed the door.
I stopped Muirne.
I did not dismount. I just stopped her, at the end of the last stand of trees, at the very edge where the meadow ended and the open country began, and I put my hand to my breast over the pouch and I let myself feel it. The cool of the circlet. The absence where the warmth had been. The small confirmed knowing that the wood, which had welcomed me on my entry and had given me the silver-wire bird’s conversation and had acknowledged our party at the shrine-stone and had carried us through the whole of its green body like a mite along the skin of a whale, had now released me. Had let me go. Had sent me on.
The others had stopped behind me when I stopped. They did not speak. I heard the horses shift their weight, and I heard the creak of a saddle as somebody turned to look at me, and I heard Tobin dismount, slow and easy, and walk up to stand beside Muirne.
“Lass,” he said, in the low grandfatherly voice.
I did not turn to him. I could not, quite. I was looking west, at the open country, at the barren hills that rose beyond the last rolling stretch of grass, at the distant horizon that would be, by the map, no more than a day’s ride from the edge of the Vale itself. I was looking west, and I was feeling the cool of the circlet at my breast, and I was feeling — reader, I will be honest with ye — I was feeling the bairn’s hollow in full bloom. The grandmother had gone inside. The door had closed. I was alone on the lane.
Tobin said, “I know, lass.”
I turned to him. My eyes were wet. I did not bother to wipe them, because Tobin had already seen them and because the wet in my eyes was not a shame but a honest wage for the feelin’ I was feelin’.
“It’s gone, Tobin.”
“Aye.”
“The wood’s gone from me.”
“Aye.”
“I didna ken it would hurt like this.”
“I ken, lass.”
He stood by Muirne’s shoulder, and he did not touch me, and he did not touch Muirne, and he did not say anything more for a while, because Tobin understood that this was one of those moments where the words would only get in the way of the feelin’, and the feelin’ needed to be felt out to its proper length before it could be set down. He just stood by the mare’s shoulder and he looked west with me, and he let me feel it for as long as I needed.
After perhaps two minutes — because I counted, in the way a scout counts when she is using time to master a thing — I let out a long breath, and I wiped my eyes with the back of my glove, and I said, “All right. All right. Thank ye, Tobin.”
“Aye, lass. Are ye ready to ride on?”
“I’m ready.”
“Then we’ll ride on.”
He walked back to his roan, and he mounted, easy as an old man mounts when he has done it for more decades than he will say, and he did not make any show of havin’ stood with me, and he did not report to the others what had passed between us, and I loved him so fiercely in that moment, reader, that I almost had to wipe my eyes a second time and did not, because I had already paid the first wage and did not owe a second.
I looked back, just once, over my shoulder, at the last of the greenwood rising behind us. It stood there, plain and honest and no longer speaking. It had finished its conversation with me. It had been a friend for the eight days of our passage. It had welcomed me, and it had acknowledged us at the shrine, and it had carried us, and now it had released me. I said, silently, to the wood — because a body has manners, even with grandmothers who have gone inside — “Thank ye. Thank ye for the welcome. Thank ye for the silver-wire bird. Thank ye for the conversation. I will not forget ye. I will tell the tale of ye in every fire I sit by for the rest of my days. Rest well, old green mother. We’re awa’ west now.”
The wood did not answer. It did not need to. It had already given me its circlet, which sat cool in my pouch, and it had already given me its silver-wire bird’s two-note farewell, which I carried in my whistle-memory, and it had already given me the knowledge that I was, in some permanent way, the wood’s acknowledged traveler, and none of those gifts were goin’ to be taken back.
I turned forward. I gave Muirne my heels. She stepped onto the open country, and the wind took her mane, and we rode.
The ride west across the open country that afternoon was, reader, a ride of a character I had not expected. I had expected, I think, to feel only the loss — only the bairn’s hollow, growing wider with every step. But that is not what I felt. What I felt, reader, was a double feelin’, which is the best kind of feelin’ a human can have, and which I will try now to describe, because describin’ it honestly is the whole gift of this tellin’.
The loss was there. The loss was real. The circlet was cool at my breast. The wood was gone from me. The bairn’s hollow was full and present. I did not try to deny it or push it aside. I let it be.
But alongside the loss, reader — alongside it and not beneath it and not above it, but beside it, the two feelings walking together like two horses at the same pace — was somethin’ else. Somethin’ bracing. Somethin’ that the wind off the open country carried into my chest and deposited there like a small warm coal. I will try to name it. It was the feelin’ of bein’ on the true leg of the journey at last. It was the feelin’ of bein’ past the threshold and into the destination country. It was the feelin’ that every mile we had ridden since Haverfold had been preparation for this afternoon, and that the afternoon was, for all its grief of partin’ with the wood, the afternoon of arrival. The Vale lay ahead. We were goin’ to ride into it by tomorrow nightfall, at the map’s reading. The choices we had been turning over at every evening fire since Aldric’s first chapter-reading were goin’ to need to become actions within days. The long slow journey of becomin’ a party — of meetin’ at the Copper Kettle as strangers, of haglin’ for supplies in Haverfold, of ridin’ through the diligent hedgerows and the watched mile and the enchanted wood, of weatherin’ the masquerade at the Four Winds and the ambush on the trail, of receivin’ Tobin’s parable and Aldric’s chapter-readin’ and Pell’s long grave instruction — all of that was a preparation for the days that lay ahead, and the days that lay ahead were the days for which the party had been formed, and I was, reader, glad to have come to them, and glad to have come to them in this particular company, and the gladness was the bracing coal in my chest that sat alongside the loss.
I thought, as we rode, of all the good days behind us. I thought of the green morning when Muirne had been fresh and the silver-wire bird had first spoken and I had first kenned the shape of what we were ridin’ into. I thought of the evening Aldric had read the chapter at the fire and the four of us had sat listenin’ with our hearts growin’ larger by the minute. I thought of the evenin’ Tobin had told the story of the goat and the king and the borrowed hat. I thought of the silent respectful way the party had dismounted at the shrine-clearing and had each laid down a token. I thought of Balthazar’s face under the canopy, and Balthazar’s mutter about the cathedral, and Balthazar leading Bramble on foot when the mare would not ride. I thought of Seraphine at the edge of Pell’s grove looking at the tapestry for a long unspeakin’ moment and understandin’ somethin’ I had not understood. I thought of Pell’s hand on Tobin’s shoulder at the grove’s far edge, and the two of them standin’ quiet in the deepening twilight, and the old friendship between them that went back longer than I had years to my name.
I thought of these things, reader, and I thought: these are the coins I have earned on this journey, and they are the richest coins of my life, and I have earned them by ridin’ these miles with these four souls, and I will keep them in the pocket of my heart for the rest of whatever days I am given, and the loss of the wood, real as it is, cannot reach into the pocket and take any of them.
The wind carried a wee snatch of something that smelled sharper than grass — the first faint dry mineral smell of the barren country — and Muirne’s ears came forward in the scout-position, and I lifted my head and looked at the far horizon, and I could see, in the blue-and-gold distance, the faint gray rise of hills that the map called the Vale’s outer shoulders, and beyond those hills, I knew, lay the pale stark country itself, and at the heart of that country, the ruins, and at the heart of the ruins, the lattice of the Silent Witness, and the bound god-mind dreamin’ in its long silence.
It was not a comfortable sight. It was not a sight that promised ease. But it was the sight, reader, that we had come all this way to see, and lookin’ at it across the open country with the wind in my face and the four souls I had come to love behind me and the cool braided circlet at my breast and the warm bracing coal alongside it, I felt a thing I had not quite felt before in my life. I felt ready. Not ready in the small ordinary way a body is ready for a day’s work. Ready in the larger way a body is ready for the thing the body was called to. Ready in the way the Periwinkles must have felt when they rose from the kitchen table with the decision made to bring the king a better hat. Ready in the way Pell must have felt, that mornin’ we departed his grove, when he understood that the seeding of generations was at last bearin’ its fruit.
I turned in my saddle. I looked at the four of them — at Aldric ridin’ steady in his middle place, at Balthazar on his Bramble with his usual mutterin’ muffled by the westward wind, at Seraphine at the rear with her small precise seat on the black mare, at Tobin ambling just behind me with the kettle softly swingin’ against his back in the rhythm that was now the rhythm of the open wind rather than the wood’s slow breath. I looked at them, and I said aloud, so that they could all hear me:
“Friends, we’re out of the wood. Next camp’s on open ground. We’ll need to pick a good hollow and set a proper watch, because there’s no canopy to hide us any longer, and whoever may be watchin’ for us can see us for miles if we let them. I’d vote for pushin’ another two hours before we stop, to put a decent stretch between us and the wood’s edge. But I’ll hear any of ye who’d rather stop sooner.”
Aldric said, “Two hours sounds wise, Ysolde.”
Balthazar muttered, “Balthazar is in favor of any plan that gets Balthazar to a hollow and a fire before dark. Two hours is acceptable.”
Seraphine said, simply, “Agreed.”
Tobin said, “Aye, lass. Ride on.”
And so we rode, for the rest of that afternoon, across the open country, and I sang no songs for the first hour, because my throat was not ready for singin’. But in the second hour, the wind lifted and the sun slanted lower and the faint gold of the westerin’ light came across the grass in that particular beautiful way it does when a day is turnin’ toward its evenin’, and Muirne’s step was strong under me, and the four souls behind me were ridin’ easy and honest, and I felt the bracing coal in my chest burn a wee bit brighter, and I opened my mouth and I sang. I did not sing a lament for the wood. I thought about singin’ one, and I decided against it. The wood did not want a lament. The wood had said goodbye cleanly, with a two-note phrase a fifth apart, and a lament for it would have been a poor answer. What the wood wanted, I judged, was for me to take up the open-country song I had been born for and had been putting aside while I sang for the wood’s ears, and to sing it full-throated at last, in the honest way I sang when I was on horseback under open sky. So I sang an open-country song. It was a ridin’ song my father had taught me when I was eight years old, a song of five verses and a chorus, about a lass on a mare named Heather and the long road west to her sister’s wedding, and it was a cheerful song, and a song for an afternoon of strong wind and good horses, and I sang it loud, and I sang it clean, and by the third verse I heard — I heard, reader, this is the truth — I heard Tobin humming along under his breath behind me. And by the fourth verse I heard Ysolde-not-me but someone-else softly joining in, and I realized after a moment of confusion that it was Aldric, who had apparently learned the song at some scholar’s function in his youth and had remembered it. And by the fifth verse Balthazar was making the low chest-cough that was his version of cheer, and even Seraphine, bless her, was not unjoinin’, which in Seraphine is as close to joinin’ as a body can get without rearrangin’ her whole person.
I finished the song. The chorus went one last time with all of them humming along at varying degrees of participation. The echo of the song rolled out across the open grass and faded into the westering wind. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I laughed the loud laugh, the one that carries, the one that had been saved by Seraphine at the Four Winds from bein’ too-loud-in-fear and had now come back to me as too-loud-in-joy, which is its honest natural register.
Muirne flicked her ears approvin’. The circlet at my breast was cool. The braiding was still as supple as it had been when Pell had given it to me, and I ken’d that the cool of it was not a diminishin’ but a restin’. The wood was not gone from me forever. It had just gone back inside its own house and closed its own door, because the day’s conversation was over, and the ridin’ now was open-country ridin’, and the wood did not have jurisdiction on open country. Somewhere, sometime, if my life was kind to me, I would come back to a greenwood — maybe this one, maybe another — and the circlet would warm again, and the conversation would resume. That was the shape of the thing. I understood it now. It was not a loss forever. It was a loss for now, and I could carry a loss for now without the bairn’s hollow becomin’ permanent, because I had the four souls behind me and the warm coal in my chest and the song in my mouth and the mare under me and the coins in my pocket, and a body with that many provisions for a long road cannot truly be emptied by any single partin’, however dear.
We rode the second hour out. We crested a small rise of the open country, and on the far side of the rise lay a good shallow hollow with a wee natural spring at its lower end, and the spring was exactly the kind of camp-place a scout would pick if she were pickin’, and Tobin said, behind me, “That’ll do, lass,” and I said, “Aye, that’ll do,” and we rode down into the hollow and dismounted and set about the makin’ of camp.
I want to tell ye one more thing before I close this tellin’, reader, because it is the thing that stayed with me most from that evenin’, and it is the thing I think ye will want to ken.
As we set up camp — Tobin buildin’ the fire, Aldric seein’ to the horses with me, Balthazar doing his muttered checks of gear, Seraphine walking her perimeter — I noticed that the sky above our hollow was wider and higher and more detailed than any sky I had looked at for eight days. The westerin’ sun was settin’ to the left of us, bathin’ the open country in that long gold-to-rose light that mothers everywhere have called the blessin’ light because it makes everythin’ look as if it had been touched by a blessin’ before goin’ to bed. The first stars were comin’ out in the east. The moon — the gas giant in the sky that Pell had called VaporSphere and the common folk called Mother Sky — was risin’ in its huge pale-banded beauty above the eastern horizon, and as it rose it made its particular slow progress against the deepening blue, and I stopped what I was doing and I watched it for a full minute, because I had not seen Mother Sky properly in eight days, and I had forgotten how much of her there was.
And as I watched, I felt somethin’ happen in the circlet at my breast. Not warmth. Not cool. Somethin’ in between. A wee flickering pulse, like the faintest memory of warmth, the way the coals of a banked fire will send a wee pulse of heat up through the ash when a small shift of air reaches them. It happened once, lasted perhaps two heartbeats, and ceased.
I put my hand to the pouch. I felt the circlet. Cool. But the memory of the pulse was clear.
Pell’s voice came back to me. When the wood has nothing more to say, it will cool. But he had not said — I realized now — that the circlet would never warm again. He had said it would cool when the wood had nothing more to say. He had not said the wood would never have anything more to say. The circlet might warm again. It might warm at moments when the wood had somethin’ particular to say to me, even from a long distance, even across the open country. It might be the wood’s way of keepin’ its own line of communication open with the scout it had acknowledged.
I did not tell the others this, not at that moment. I would tell them, probably, tomorrow or the day after, at some appropriate fire. But I tucked the knowing away in the pocket of my heart, next to the coins, and I felt the bairn’s hollow fill in a wee bit, not because the wood had come back, but because I had understood somethin’ about the shape of our goodbye that I had not understood at the tree-line. The grandmother had gone inside. But the grandmother had, it seemed, left the wee window beside the door slightly open, and sometimes when the bairn was on the lane far down the road, the grandmother would lean out the window and call, and the bairn would hear it, and the bairn would ken that the grandmother still watched, even from inside.
I bent to the settin’ up of camp. I tended the horses. I helped Tobin with the fire. I shared out my sausage for the supper. I sat by the flames when they were burnin’, and I took the cup of Tobin’s kettle-tea when it was passed to me, and I watched the five of us settle into our evening-log arrangement, and I thought, for the last thought of this long day’s tellin’:
We’ve left the wood. The wood has left us. But not entirely. Nothing in this life is ever left entirely. And now the Vale is ahead, and we are all of us carryin’, on top of everythin’ else we’ve been carryin’, the particular readiness of a party that has come through its long preparation and arrived at the threshold of the deed.
I rubbed my thumb over the cool circlet one last time before I slept. I said silently to it, and to the wood, and to whatever part of the wood’s attention might be listenin’: Rest well, old mother. We’re here. We’ll do the thing we can do. We’ll do it as honest as we ken how. Watch over us if ye like, and if ye dinna, we’ll understand. Good night.
The circlet did not pulse again. But it was warm against my breastbone all night long, reader, warmer than cool, and I woke the next morning to find that it had kept my skin warmer than the rest of my body through the cold of the open-country night, and I took that as the small quiet answer that it was, and I said nothin’ about it to anyone, because some answers are best kept private, and this was one.
We rode west at dawn. The Vale was one day ahead. The four souls and I and our horses and our coins in our several pockets moved across the open country under the rising sun, and the wood behind us kept its door closed, but the window, I think, stayed open, and I rode on.
Segment 14: Upon the Desolate Plain
Call me, still, Balthazar. Call me that one more time, reader, because the calling is a small anchor I reach for when the medium through which I am about to move is of a character so alien to my constitution that I need the familiar syllables of my own name to remind me that I have not altogether evaporated into the pale dry air of the country now before us. The country before us, this morning, as we crested the last rise of the open grasslands and drew up our horses at the lip of a long shallow descent, was the Vale. And the Vale, reader, was what I had come four hundred miles and eleven days to see, and it was not what I had pictured, and it had also — and this is the part of the seeing that I want to set down with the greatest care, because it is the part that will stay with me longest — it had been exactly what some corner of my sailor’s soul had always expected a dead place to look like, once I finally saw one with my own eyes.
We had ridden out of Ysolde’s hollow at the first gray thinning of the east, and we had ridden north and west by Pell’s map for some three hours across the open country, the wind at our backs now for the first time in three days, cool and steady, and the sun climbing behind us in the way a lamp is lifted slowly from behind a shoulder to illuminate the thing being examined. Ysolde had ridden ahead, as always; Aldric behind her, composing softly under his breath; I in the middle on my patient Bramble, who had become, in the course of our passage through the enchanted wood and out of it again, more nearly a friend than any horse had ever been to me, though I would not have said so aloud if you had put me to the rack for the confession; Tobin behind me with his kettle knocking softly in its usual rhythm; and Seraphine at the rear upon Andromache, her posture the composed neutral posture she kept whenever she was riding into a country she had never seen and was therefore committing every visible feature of it to her memory at the rate of one feature every three heartbeats.
The grasslands had been pleasant. I want to mark this, because the pleasantness of the grasslands was the foil against which the Vale would present itself, and the contrast was the whole substance of the morning. The grasslands had been a broad and rolling country of ordinary summer grass, with small copses of oak and beech at irregular intervals, and scattered patches of wildflowers in their late-season bloom, and the occasional startled flight of a pheasant from the track at our approach, and the small ordinary signs of an ordinary world that was working in its ordinary way — insects, birds, a fox at one point trotting across our path with a dead rabbit in its jaws, utterly indifferent to us, its whole attention given to the rabbit. Life, in short. Ordinary life. The life one takes for granted until one has lost it and regained it and then is asked to ride at the edge of it to the edge of something else.
We crested the rise. Ysolde reined Muirne in first, and the rest of us came up alongside her in a rough line, because the sight below required us to stop, and we all knew it required us to stop before any of us had consciously decided to rein in. The horses themselves stopped. Bramble halted without my touch on the rein, and she flared her nostrils and snorted once in the particular dry snort a horse makes when she has detected a scent she does not understand, and her ears went back in a posture of canine wariness that I had never seen on a horse before. Muirne, Ysolde’s dun mare, did something stranger: she lowered her head to the grass as if to crop it, then lifted her head without having cropped anything, and did the same again, and again, as though she were attempting to reconcile the information coming through her nose with the information coming through her eyes and could find no reconciliation. The other three horses stood stock still, ears forward, refusing to move.
The Vale lay below us.
I will attempt, reader, to describe what I saw, because the description is the labor that is now required of me, and because I have been promising you for two segments that when we finally reached the Vale I would try to do justice to its particular quality, and the moment of the reaching has come. I will describe it in three registers: first, the plain visible geography; second, the quality of the air; third, the atmospheric effect that was, more than either of the other two, the thing that made me understand, with a kind of slow sinking certainty in my chest, that we had arrived at a place where something had ended long ago and had not been replaced.
The plain visible geography was a shallow bowl, perhaps nine miles across at its widest, ringed by low pale gray hills of a height that suggested them to be more in the nature of the rim of a subsidence than proper mountains. The bowl was not deep; its floor lay perhaps five hundred feet below our present elevation, which was the elevation of the lip, and the descent from the lip to the floor was gradual rather than steep, sloping down in broad dusty terraces. The floor of the bowl, spread out before us in the morning’s pale light, was a wide flat expanse of a color that I can only describe as bone-white with a faint gray undertone, the color of a beach that has been bleached by too many seasons of unforgiving sun. There was no grass on the floor. There were no trees. There was no water, visible as any shine or glint. There were no tracks of animal passage. There was no wind-movement of any visible matter, because there was nothing visible to move; the floor was a level dust, with, here and there, darker shapes that on closer inspection proved to be exposed rock or the bleached bones of some long-dead thing or, at the very heart of the bowl, the ruins of the city.
The ruins of the city, reader, were the center of the whole composition, and the composition had been arranged, by whatever force had arranged it, such that the eye was drawn to them by every feature of the landscape. The shallow bowl sloped toward them. The gray rim hills pointed toward them. The very lay of the ancient terraces stepped down toward them. They were the heart of the place, and they had been the heart of the place for eight thousand years, and though they had been dead for all of those years, they were still, architecturally and compositionally, the heart. They occupied perhaps a square mile of the bowl’s floor, and they showed, from our distant vantage, as a cluster of pale-stone structures, many of them fallen, a few still standing to half their original height, with a central building that was taller than the rest, though still substantially reduced from what must have been its original glory. The central building — this I would later confirm, and Aldric would later confirm, and Pell had foreshadowed in his telling at the cottage — was the temple-lattice of the Silent Witness. It was a broad low structure with the remains of a columned portico, and even at our distance I could see that it had once been roofed, and that the roof had once been an open lattice through which light descended, and that the lattice was now broken and the light now descended, in such patches as had survived, through gaps rather than patterns.
That was the visible geography. Now let me attempt the quality of the air.
The wind, which had been at our backs for three hours, stopped at the lip of the bowl. It did not die, exactly; it simply ceased to penetrate below the level of the lip. Above us, on our side of the rise, the grassland’s air continued its ordinary westerly breeze, with its ordinary smells of summer grass and distant earth and the small warm animal smell of horses. Below us, the air of the bowl was still. Perfectly still. There was no visible stratification, no shimmer-line, no barrier; the two bodies of air simply met at the rim and neither crossed. This, reader, was a physical impossibility of the first order, and it announced to any man of my profession, who had spent his life in the reading of air and wind as the primary data of his trade, that we had reached the edge of a region whose laws of atmosphere were not the laws of the world we had ridden from. The sailor in me registered this first. The sailor in me registered it before the scholar in me had finished composing any sentence about it, before the philosopher in me had begun to approach the implications, before the ordinary Balthazar in me had fully accepted that such a thing could be.
And then the sailor in me registered the smell.
Reader, I do not know how to explain to you what the Vale smelled like unless you have smelled something comparable. I will try. When a ship is driven aground and abandoned on a coast, and the coast is harsh, and the timbers are left to be worked on by the sun and the salt and the wind for decades, the timbers do not rot in the ordinary way that timbers rot in temperate woods. They bleach. They dry. They acquire a particular smell, neither green nor quite mineral, but something in between, a smell of ancient wood from which all the moisture has been drawn by the combined forces of sun and salt, until what remains is a skeleton of wood that still holds its shape but has none of wood’s properties, and if you put your nose to such a timber it smells of the last salt that the sun could not bake out and the last air that the salt could not sterilize. That smell, reader, is what I mean by the salt-dry smell. I have smelled it on the coasts of four countries. I have smelled it on wrecks that were, by the most generous estimate, sixty or seventy years gone. I have smelled it on one piece of timber pulled from a grave that a learned archivist claimed to be of seven hundred years’ lying.
The Vale smelled of the salt-dry smell. Not of a single timber. Of the whole country. The whole bowl below us exhaled, faintly and continuously, the salt-dry smell of a wood that has been bleaching in a harsh coast for an impossibly long time. And the smell was not exactly what I had smelled on the coasts. It had an additional note. There was a mineral sharpness beneath it that was not salt but something very like salt, and there was a faint — I will search for the word — a faint chalkiness, the chalk of the inside of an old school-slate that has been written and erased and written and erased for a generation. And there was, beneath all of these, an almost imperceptible hint of something that was not quite ozone and not quite the burnt-match smell of a used matchstick, which I recognized without at first being able to name, and which I named, after perhaps thirty seconds of consideration, as the smell of old magic that had once been live magic and was now the residue of a reaction that had concluded so long ago that only the very faintest of its reagents remained.
That was the smell. It was the smell, reader, of a place where something enormous had happened and had finished happening, and where nothing else had begun to happen since, and where the happening that had happened and the not-happening that had followed had between them created a country whose air was the exhausted breath of a dead process.
And now, finally, let me attempt the atmospheric effect, because neither the geography nor the smell, separately or together, conveys what I am trying to convey.
The atmospheric effect was this. The light, upon the Vale’s floor, was not the light of the morning above the rim. The morning above the rim was the ordinary bright summer morning of the grasslands, gold-white, the sun risen perhaps thirty degrees above the eastern horizon, casting broad clean shadows. The light upon the Vale’s floor was a paler light, diffused, as though the sun’s rays reaching the floor had had to pass through some thin veil of high dust or vapor, though no dust or vapor was visible. The shadows of the ruins on the floor were softer-edged than shadows should have been; they faded at their boundaries in a way shadows do not fade in ordinary light. The pale bone-white of the floor did not reflect the sunlight the way a pale surface should; it seemed rather to absorb the light and return only a fraction of it, so that the floor glowed with a dimmer luminance than its color would have promised. The whole bowl, in short, had the look of a country seen through a thin sheet of pale frosted glass, and the glass was not between us and the country, but between the country and its own sunlight. Something was intercepting the sun. Something was filtering the day’s light before it reached the dust. And I do not mean a cloud, reader. There was no cloud. I mean something was filtering the light itself, at the level of the air.
I sat on Bramble’s back and I looked down at this country and I felt my chest do the thing it had done twice before in my life, and which I had not felt in some years, and which I had hoped never to feel again.
My chest felt, reader, the way it had felt the first time I was under and the water closed over me. You understand. I do not need to elaborate. Some of you will understand and some of you will not, and to those of you who do not, I can only say that there is a particular quality of the chest’s registration when it encounters, for the first time, a medium in which the ordinary laws of survival do not obtain, and my chest was registering now that we were about to ride into such a medium.
Nobody spoke for some time. I will tell you how long, because I counted. Four minutes and perhaps twenty seconds, by my sailor’s reckoning of the slow internal clock I use on watches. Four minutes and twenty seconds, during which the five of us sat our horses on the lip of the bowl and looked down at the Vale, and the horses stood without moving, and the air of the bowl did not stir, and the only sounds were the small ordinary sounds of our own breathing and the occasional creak of a saddle and, once, a distant thin cry of a bird from somewhere behind us in the grasslands, which was the last bird-cry we would hear for some time.
Ysolde spoke first. Her voice, when it came, was lower than her ordinary voice, the way a body’s voice goes lower when it finds itself in a place that asks for lowness. She said, “There’s no life in it.”
“No,” said Aldric, in the same register.
“None at all, Aldric. I’m tellin’ ye. I can see a square mile of country from here and I can tell ye there is not one livin’ thing in it. Not a beetle. Not a blade of grass. Not a moss on a stone. Nothing.”
“That,” said Aldric, “is consistent with what Pell described. The civilization’s fall was not an ordinary fall. It took with it the land it occupied. The binding drew so much of the surrounding magic into its maintenance that the land around the central lattice lost its capacity to sustain ordinary biological processes. The bowl is a depletion zone.”
“A depletion zone,” muttered I, because muttering was all I had available to me at that moment, and because muttering is the sailor’s last recourse when the sailor is out of his depth. “Balthazar notes that Balthazar has seen a depletion zone before. Balthazar has seen a fishing ground where the fleet took out every last cod over a period of thirty years and afterward, for two decades, nothing could be caught there. The water was the same water. The temperature was the same temperature. But the fish had been taken. And they had taken with them the food-chain that would have replaced them. Balthazar has seen a depletion zone of water. This is a depletion zone of earth. The mechanism is not different. The scale is different. The recovery time, Balthazar suspects, is also different.”
“The recovery time of the water-zone?” asked Aldric.
“Thirty years. Forty. The fish came back, eventually. Not in the numbers they had been. But they came back.”
“The recovery time of the earth-zone?” asked Ysolde.
“Balthazar,” said I, “does not wish to speculate.”
Seraphine, who had been silent at the rear and who had evidently completed whatever cataloguing her trained attention had required of the Vale by this point, said quietly, “Eight thousand years of depletion. And no recovery. The binding continues to draw. The land continues not to replenish. If the binding fails and the Silent Witness wakes, and the draw on the land is released — how long for this country to recover?”
“I do not know,” said Aldric. “I have not seen this estimated anywhere in the sources I have read. Pell perhaps would know. We did not ask him.”
“A century,” said Tobin, from behind me. “Maybe two.”
We all turned to look at him. Tobin had not, until this moment, spoken. He sat on his old roan with his usual grandfatherly amble, but his face was grave, and his eyes were not on the floor of the Vale but on some distant point beyond it, the way a man’s eyes fix on a distant point when he is remembering rather than seeing.
“Tobin?” said Ysolde.
“A century,” he said again, “or two. Grass first, in patches, at the edges, after perhaps thirty years. Then small scrub. Then the beginning of trees at fifty. Real trees at eighty. A proper living ecosystem by a century and a half. Birds come back at about the seventy-year mark. Larger animals at about the hundred-year. The soil recovers slowly because the soil here has been drained of the small magical substrate that the ordinary life of Saṃsāra requires. That will regenerate, but slowly. I’ve seen it.”
“You’ve seen it,” said Ysolde.
“I’ve seen the other two Vales recover,” said Tobin. “Not completely. But to the point where a grown man could walk across them and see birds, and lie down on grass, and drink from a spring that tasted of water rather than of ash. They are not this Vale. They had smaller bindings. They recovered faster. But the shape is the same. This Vale will recover, if the binding is allowed to fail. A century. Maybe two.”
He fell silent. Nobody asked him anything further, because nobody needed to. Tobin had, with the offhand authority of a man who was reporting on projects he had been part of, confirmed that the scenario Pell had laid out was a scenario Tobin himself had seen play out. He was not speculating. He was reporting.
I took this in, and I felt the sinking in my chest deepen by a further fraction, and I felt, alongside the sinking, a small unexpected warming, which was the warming of understanding that I was in the company of a man who had done this work before, and that the work could be done, and that the work had been done, and that the work was, at its largest scale, the slow patient restoration of depleted country to living country, and that this was a good work, the largest and most patient good work I had ever been proximate to in my life, and that my small part in it, whatever that part was to be in the days ahead, was a part worth playing.
I want to mark this, reader, because the marking will help me hold the balance of the emotion I am trying to describe. The Vale was grim. The Vale was awful. The Vale was a depletion zone of eight thousand years’ standing, and it was the visible evidence of a loss on a scale no human soul is meant to comprehend. But the Vale was also — and this is the thing I want you to hold against the grimness — the Vale was also a recoverable country. It was not gone forever. It was not dead forever. It was sleeping in the particular cold sleep of exhausted land, and it could be woken by the right action in the right hour, and the right action and the right hour were, by all the evidence we had accumulated across the last two weeks of journeying, now in our hands.
I sat on Bramble and I looked down into the bowl and I thought: the country is sick, and the country can be healed, and we have come here to choose whether to heal it.
That was the balance. That was the whole of the emotion. Grim awe, weighted with inherited grief — grief for a civilization I had never known, grief for a lover of Pell’s whose name I did not know, grief for the small lost things that had, at some specific unimaginable hour eight thousand years ago, stopped being small living things and started being the salt-dry residue that now exhaled from the bowl below us. And, alongside the grief, awe. The awe of a scale of event that no ordinary human life is equipped to contain. The awe of standing on the lip of a catastrophe that has finished happening and has been patient for eighty centuries. The awe of being permitted, however briefly, to witness such a thing with one’s own eyes.
I have said that the grief was inherited, and I want to pause on the word, because it is the word I chose deliberately, and it will not mean what I want it to mean unless I explain it. The grief I felt, reader, was not my personal grief. I had not lost anything in the Vale. I had no ancestor of the civilization whose bleached bones now made up the pale dust of the bowl. I had no lover bound into the lattice. I had no childhood memory of a country this had once been. My connection to the loss was, strictly speaking, zero. And yet the grief was there, reader. It was there in my chest as surely as any personal grief I had ever carried. It had the same weight, the same pressure beneath the sternum, the same small tight ache at the throat. It was a grief I was feeling on behalf of people I had never met and a country I had never known.
This is what I mean by inherited grief. When a human soul is permitted to stand on the lip of a very old catastrophe and look down into it, and understand, as I now understood, the rough dimensions of the loss, something happens in the soul that is not the soul’s personal emotion but is instead the soul acting as a vessel for the emotion that the lost ones themselves cannot any longer feel, because they are gone. The grief does not die with the mourners. The grief is inherited, down the generations, by whoever happens to stand next on the lip of the bowl and look in. I was standing on the lip. I was inheriting the grief. I had not asked for it. It had been handed to me simply by my having ridden here with my companions, and the weight of it was the weight of eighty centuries of accumulated mourning that had been waiting for a human soul to arrive who was capable of feeling it.
I was not the first soul to inherit it. Pell had inherited it. Tobin had inherited it, twice before and now for a third time. Pell’s long-lost Attendant had inherited it, perhaps, as her civilization fell. Aldric had, by the look on his face at that moment, been inheriting it since his first reading of the chapter. Seraphine had probably been inheriting it since the tapestry in Pell’s parlor. Ysolde had, I am sure, begun inheriting it when the silver-wire bird sang its farewell at the wood’s edge and her circlet cooled.
We were all inheriting it. We were inheriting it together, as a party of five souls at the lip of a bowl on a bright morning. And this — reader, this was the thing I wanted to say, and have been circling in this segment for too long without saying — this was why the work of the next days mattered. The work of the next days was the work of taking the inherited grief, this old weight that had been waiting for someone to arrive and feel it, and converting it into something other than grief. Grief, unconverted, sits in the chest and does nothing. Grief, converted, becomes the fuel for whatever action the mourner undertakes in the name of the mourned. We would convert the grief. We would convert it into the action that freed the Silent Witness, that let the binding fail, that returned the bowl to grass and then scrub and then tree and then bird and then, at the century-and-a-half mark, to the full life Tobin had promised it could recover. We would be the converters. Our small party of five would take the eight thousand years of accumulated mourning that the Vale had been holding on behalf of its dead, and we would spend it on the one action that those dead, if they could have spoken, would most likely have asked for.
This is the use of a party. This is the use, I now understood, of any party of five souls riding toward a bound god at the lip of a dead bowl. The party is a vessel for inherited grief. The party converts the grief into action. The party does this because a single soul cannot alone bear the full weight of eight millennia of accumulated mourning, and so the mourning is distributed across five souls, and each of us carries a fifth of the weight, which is still more weight than any one of us has ever carried, but which is, at a fifth, bearable. A fifth of eight thousand years is sixteen centuries. I could bear sixteen centuries. I could not bear eighty. And neither could Ysolde. And neither could Aldric. And neither, I suspect, could Seraphine, though she would have tried. And Tobin, I now understood, had been bearing his fifth alone for longer than the rest of us had been alive, and had been waiting — patiently, grandfatherly, without complaint — for four more souls to arrive who could relieve him of four-fifths of his share.
We sat on our horses at the lip. The horses waited. The bowl exhaled its salt-dry breath. The morning sun did not quite reach the floor of the bowl with its full light. The ruins of the city crouched at the center like the broken skeleton of some very large creature that had been lying on its side for so long that the grass had once grown over it and then the grass had gone and only the bones remained.
Ysolde, after another long minute, said, “We should not ride down today. We should camp here on the rim, and we should approach the floor tomorrow, after we have rested and taken proper counsel.”
“Agreed,” said Seraphine, at once.
“Agreed,” said Aldric.
“Agreed,” I muttered.
“Agreed, lass,” said Tobin. “Good instinct. A body should not ride into a place like this at the start of a day. A body should ride in at the start of a morning fresh, with a night of sleep between the first seeing and the first entering. Camp on the rim. We’ll approach tomorrow at the second dawn from here.”
We turned the horses. We rode back perhaps half a mile along our approach, to a small hollow beside a modest spring that we had passed earlier in the morning without stopping. The hollow was the last living hollow of the grasslands before the country became the country of the bowl. Its grass was thick. Its spring ran clear. A small population of insects chirred in the low shrubs at its edge. A hawk, as we rode in, circled once overhead and then flew eastward out of sight, about its hawk-business.
We dismounted. We made camp. We made it with a kind of slow deliberate attention that we had not brought to any previous camp of the journey, because we all, I think, understood without speaking that this was the last ordinary camp we would make before entering the Vale, and we wanted the camp to be made properly. Tobin built the fire. Ysolde saw to the horses with particular tenderness, grooming each of them more thoroughly than she had in days, and speaking to each of them in the low country whisper she used with horses she wanted to thank. Aldric unpacked his tome and his quill and his inks, but for once he did not write; he sat quietly with the tome closed in his lap, looking east and south toward the rim of the Vale, and I knew he was composing in his head, and I left him to it. Seraphine walked her perimeter, but she walked it twice rather than once, and when she returned to the fire she did not immediately sit; she stood for a moment at its edge, her hand resting lightly on the dagger-pin at her chest, and she looked out toward the rim with an expression I had not seen on her face before. The expression was not fear. It was not calculation. It was, as near as I could read it, a kind of quiet reverent attention — the attention a professional gives to a room whose dimensions she has just been told will be the dimensions of the most important work she will ever perform.
I, for my part, saw to the saddlebags and the waterskins, which were the tasks I always saw to at camp-setup, because the saddlebags and the waterskins were the equipment I trusted least to other hands and therefore the equipment I had designated as my own responsibility. I checked the seams of the waterskins. I checked the straps of the saddlebags. I found, among the provisions Pell had packed for us, a small jar I had not seen him pack, a small earthenware jar with a wax-sealed stopper and a label in Pell’s neat upright hand, and the label read: for the air of the Vale, taken three times daily upon the tongue, one drop per adult per dose. I turned the jar over in my hand. It was heavier than its size suggested, and the liquid inside, when I tipped it slowly, moved with a viscosity more like honey than like any ordinary tincture. I set the jar on top of the saddlebag so that the others would see it when they came to the provisions. I made a mental note to ask Tobin what it was, because Tobin would know.
I crossed to the fire. Tobin had put the kettle on. The kettle was, I realized with a small interior start, beginning to develop its own crackle of age, the hairline age-lines appearing on its clay sides in the places where it had seen the most heat over the longest period, and I understood that Tobin had been carrying this particular kettle for longer than I had suspected, perhaps a great deal longer, and that the kettle was not merely a convenience of his profession as a wandering grandfather but was a relic of his longer life, and that the knocking rhythm of it against his back during our rides had been the rhythm of a clock that had been marking time for him across more years than he had allowed any of us to know. I sat beside him. I did not speak. I was not, at that moment, ready to speak.
Tobin poured the tea. He passed me a cup. He passed one to Ysolde, who had come over to join us. Aldric accepted his with his customary grave thanks. Seraphine, when she finally approached the fire, took hers and held it in both hands and did not sip immediately, but looked into the steam rising from it for perhaps thirty seconds with that same reverent attention before lifting the cup to her lips.
The sun climbed toward its noon. The wind freshened in the grasslands around us and did not penetrate below the rim half a mile away. The five of us sat with our cups of tea in our hands, and none of us spoke for a long while, and the silence was the good silence of five people who have seen the same thing at the same moment and who are, each in their own register, assimilating it.
At length Aldric said, softly, “I would propose we speak now about what we shall do tomorrow.”
“I would propose,” said Seraphine, “that we speak instead about what we shall feel tomorrow, and that we speak of what we shall do only after we have given the feeling its proper due. A party that has just inherited a large grief should not immediately convert it into a tactical plan. A party should sit with the grief for a day and a night. Then the plan will form itself.”
I looked at her. I was surprised, frankly, by the proposal, because Seraphine was the member of our party most disposed toward tactical planning and least disposed toward sitting with feelings, and her proposal reversed my expectation. She saw me looking. She caught my eye across the fire. She gave me the very small smile I had come to recognize as her permission-for-surprise smile, and she said, in the low voice: “I have learned, Master Balthazar, from an earlier engagement in this journey, that sitting with a feeling before converting it to action produces better action than converting it prematurely. This was a lesson I received from a grandfather at a fire some nights past. I am applying the lesson.”
Tobin did not look up from his tea. But the corner of his mouth did a small thing that was, in Tobin’s face-language, an acknowledgment and a thank-you.
“I second Seraphine’s proposal,” said Ysolde, gently.
“I third it,” said Aldric, after a pause in which I could see him adjust his expectation from the scholarly-discussion he had primed himself for to the slower sitting-with he was being invited into.
“I fourth,” said I, because it was what came out of my mouth, and because I found, to my surprise, that the fourth was genuinely what I wanted.
“Then we shall sit,” said Seraphine.
We sat. We sat, reader, for most of the rest of that day. We sat at the fire. We took our midday meal in a quiet that was not strained. We tended the horses at intervals. We walked, singly and in pairs, around the camp’s edge for stretches of the afternoon, but we did not go far, and we did not speak much, and when we came back to the fire we took up our places again and we drank more of the tea and we looked at each other, sometimes, across the fire, and sometimes we did not even look at each other, but simply knew each other to be present, which was the better form of the sitting.
I will tell you, reader, what I did during the sitting, because the doing was itself the thing.
I did the accounting of my own inherited grief. I did it slowly. I did it without forcing it into any particular shape. I let it come to me in whatever order it chose, and I received each item as it arrived.
I received, first, the image of the bowl. The pale bone-white. The salt-dry exhalation. The filtered light. I let myself see it again, not with my eyes — my eyes were on the fire — but with the interior eye that holds images after the original seeing. I let the image sit. I let it be the first item in the accounting.
I received, second, the faces of the civilization that had built the Vale. I did not know those faces. I had no image of them. But I imagined, vaguely, the shape of them: human faces, not unlike ours, with the particular marks of a people who had spent generations contributing their attention to a great lattice. I imagined some of them standing, at the century of the binding, around the central structure, their hands joined, pouring themselves into the work. I imagined the moment when the binding took hold. I imagined the ones who had died of the effort, one in twenty of the adult mages. I imagined the ones who had survived and who had walked away from the central structure afterward, knowing that their civilization’s great mind was now silent, knowing also that the bowl around them had begun, at that very hour, to die. I imagined the slow dying of the bowl over the following generations. I imagined the last of the civilization to leave the bowl, some unrecorded man or woman standing at the lip of the hills perhaps a century after the binding, looking back at what had been their home, and walking east into the grasslands without looking back again. I imagined this person. I did not know their name. But I mourned them, at the fire, in the small interior way one mourns a stranger whose existence has just become real to one.
I received, third, the more specific images from Pell’s cottage. The tapestry behind the hearth. The two figures in the faded weaving. The woman in the silver-gray robe. The Attendant of the Silent Witness. I had, I will admit, not given this woman my attention when Seraphine had, as I now understood, deduced her existence from the tapestry. I had registered the tapestry as a decoration. Seraphine had registered the tapestry as an entire biography. Now, at the fire, I gave the Attendant her due. I imagined her. I did not know her name either. But I imagined her in the silver-gray robe, standing in the central structure of the Vale at the moment of the binding, her hand in the hand of the man who would later, in a later life and a different name, call himself Pell. I imagined her pouring herself into the lattice as one of the three hundred thousand contributors. I imagined her small particular consciousness becoming part of the ambient field of the bound Witness. I imagined her persisting there, in the distributed form of a faded ghost among the specters, for eight thousand years. I imagined Pell coming, each century of each life, to the edge of the bowl and looking down toward the central structure where her particular fragment persisted, and leaving again without being able to reach her. I mourned her too. I mourned her by the specific pang that comes of imagining a beloved of someone you have met.
I received, fourth, the faces of my own dead. I had not expected this. The sitting-with-a-feeling had taken me, in its own slow and unasked way, to the faces of my own dead, who had been waiting for me to have the time for them, and who had assessed, correctly, that the present afternoon was the time. I saw, in the interior eye, the face of my first captain, who had taught me to read a seam and who had gone down with his ship on a coast I shall not name; I saw the face of my mother, who had indeed been alive on my last visit home forty years ago but whom I had long since presumed dead and whom I had never gone back to find out about; I saw the face of a woman with whom I had been briefly and foolishly in love in a port-city of my young adulthood, whose name I had not spoken aloud in thirty years, and who, I now realized with the small clarity that the Vale’s inherited grief had granted me, had died perhaps a decade ago of a fever I had read about in a broadsheet and not connected to her until this moment. I mourned each of these in turn. I did not weep. But I did the thing the sailor does, which is to say their names silently to the fire, one at a time, in the order the interior eye presented them, and I let each name be released to the rising smoke.
I received, fifth and last, an unexpected image. I received the image of the silver-wire bird. I had not made my own acknowledgment of the silver-wire bird at the wood’s edge; Ysolde had made it, and Ysolde had performed the exchange, and I had understood the ceremony without participating in it. Now, at the fire at the rim of the Vale, the silver-wire bird’s image came to me, and I recognized, with something like a private blush, that I had not thanked the wood on my own behalf for the days of its passage. I mourned the wood briefly. I mourned, in particular, the moment when my own muttering had stopped in the first hour of our entry and I had said, aloud and without consulting my usual habit of self-control, Balthazar was raised in a cathedral. Balthazar remembers. I had not since explained this utterance to anyone, not even to myself, and I will not explain it here. I will say only that the silver-wire bird, in my interior eye at the fire, nodded its small bright head once to me, as if to acknowledge that it had heard my particular Balthazarian utterance and had received it as the small offering it was, and I took the nod as the wood’s way of saying its farewell to me, belatedly, and I took the belated farewell with the smallest of smiles and the smallest of lowered heads, because the wood had not forgotten me even though I had been slow to remember to thank it.
These five items of the accounting took me, I judged, perhaps an hour and a half of the sitting. I made no effort to hasten them. I made no effort to prolong them. They came in their order and I received them in their order and when the fifth was complete I raised my head and I found that the others had each been performing their own versions of the same work, and I saw on their faces the small worn quiet of souls who had been letting old dead visit them at the fire for the time it took to visit.
Tobin was the first to lift his eyes fully. He said, in his quiet grandfatherly voice, “Everybody all right?”
Ysolde said, “Aye, Tobin. I’m all right.”
Aldric said, “I am all right, Goodman Whittlehouse.”
Seraphine said, “I am all right.”
I said, “Balthazar is all right. Balthazar is — different, perhaps, than Balthazar was this morning, but Balthazar is all right.”
Tobin nodded. “Good. Then we’ll make supper.”
Supper was made. Supper was eaten. Supper was, for what had been a hard day of inherited griefs, a surprisingly ordinary supper, and the ordinariness of it was its virtue. We ate the provisions Pell had packed for us. We drank more tea. We did not speak of the Vale further, because we had agreed to let the feeling sit for a day and a night, and an evening meal was within that day’s span, and further talk would have constituted premature conversion.
As the sun set, I walked to the edge of the hollow and looked west one more time toward the rim of the Vale. The evening light reached the rim but did not, as I had expected, cross into the bowl. The bowl darkened early, about an hour before the surrounding grasslands, because its filtered light closed out sooner. By the time the full sunset came on, the bowl was a pool of dimness at the edge of the gold-and-rose country, and I stood at the edge of the hollow and watched the contrast, and I let one further image come to me, which was the image of the Vale awake — of the bowl a century and a half from some future hour, with its grass and its scrub and its small returning trees, with the ruins still visible but softened by moss and ivy, with birds crossing the air above it, with a small spring somewhere in its heart that tasted of water rather than of ash. I held the image in my mind for as long as I could hold it. I did not know if we would be the party that produced the image. I did not know if the image would come to pass at all. But I held it, and I let it hold me, and I thought: this is the thing worth doing. If I am asked to give my remaining years to producing this image, I will give them. If I am asked to give my remaining months, I will give them. If I am asked to give my remaining days, I will give them. If I am asked, in some final hour, to give the last breath I have in me to the producing of this image, I will give the breath, and I will do so without the muttering that has accompanied every ordinary transaction of my life, because this is not an ordinary transaction, and the muttering will not be in me when the hour comes. The muttering is for the markets. For this, I have a different voice. For this, I have the voice I used when I was raised in a cathedral, which is the voice I have not let myself use since — and which, I realize now at the edge of this hollow with the ruined bowl darkening below the rim, has been what I was carrying with me through every smaller transaction of my life, waiting for a transaction of sufficient scale to be worthy of it.
I walked back to the fire. The others were arranging their bedrolls. Tobin had already laid out his. Ysolde was brushing Muirne one last time. Aldric was setting a small stone under his head to tilt the pillow properly for his scholar’s neck, which he had explained to me once was the cause of his recurrent morning headaches. Seraphine was at her perimeter, making the last long slow walk of it for the evening.
I went to my bedroll. I lay down. I put my hand on my chest over the inner pocket of my coat, where the small flat green stone Pell had given me in the morning of our departure from his cottage was now resting. I had been carrying it there all day without thinking about it. I thought about it now. Pell had told me, in his low voice as he pressed the stone into my hand at the grove’s edge, only: “You will know when to use it. Keep it close.” I had not asked him for more. I did not ask him now, mentally. I accepted that the knowing would arrive when it was supposed to arrive, because Pell was a man whose gifts arrived at the hour they were supposed to, and the man had been practicing the giving of such gifts for longer than the Vale had been desolate.
I closed my eyes. I heard the fire crack. I heard Tobin’s kettle, cooling on its trivet, make its small ceramic ticks. I heard Bramble, twenty yards off, blow out her nostrils in the particular sigh a horse gives when she has settled for the night. I heard Ysolde hum, under her breath, a fragment of the open-country song she had sung the previous afternoon. I heard Aldric turning a page of the tome he had not meant to open but was, nonetheless, opening for a final check of some detail. I heard Seraphine’s boots returning from the perimeter, and I heard her settle into her own bedroll with the small efficient movements she always used.
And then, reader, I heard something I did not expect, and which I want to set down in closing, because the hearing of it was the final note of this long day that I wish to preserve.
I heard Tobin say, softly, from his bedroll on the other side of the fire from mine, almost a whisper but meant to be heard by the party:
“We’re here, friends. Rest well. The work begins at dawn.”
Simple words. Unadorned words. The kind of words a grandfather says to a household at the end of a hard day, signaling that he has seen the day through, has judged it acceptable, and is now releasing the household into sleep.
I lay on my bedroll and I listened to the words and I felt, beneath the inherited grief that was still settled in my chest, a small warm coal of something I had not expected to feel on the evening of my first seeing of the Vale. The coal was peace. Not happiness. Not comfort. Peace — the particular peace that comes to a soul when the soul has arrived at the place it has been traveling to, and has understood the nature of the place, and has committed, without conditions, to do its part of the work that the place requires.
I turned my face to the fire. I watched the embers for a while. The embers did their slow settling. The sky above the hollow filled with strange Saṃsāran stars, and the great pale bulk of VaporSphere, the gas giant, rose its enormous banded body above the eastern horizon in the particular late-summer slant that Ysolde had once pointed out to me as the best slant for traveling under. I watched the moon rise. I thought, with the small quiet gladness of a man who has been surprised by his own interior weather, that I had ridden four hundred miles under an increasingly enchanted sky and had emerged at a dead country, and that the combination was not a contradiction but a wholeness, and that the wholeness was the shape of the world I had been given to live in, and that I would be grateful, for whatever remained of my sailing days upon this moon, to have been given the chance to see it.
I closed my eyes. I slept. I did not dream. Or if I dreamed, I did not remember the dream on waking. What I remember is only this: that I went to sleep on the rim of the Vale with the salt-dry breath of an eight-thousand-year-old loss faintly in my nose, and I woke the next morning in the same hollow with the sun just beginning to touch the eastern rim of the bowl, and my chest was, for the first time in many mornings, at ease with itself; and the day’s work, whatever it was to be, was welcome to me.
I rose. I rolled my bedroll. I went to see to the horses. Tobin was already up, kindling the morning fire. Ysolde was already at the spring, filling the waterskins. Aldric was already at his tome. Seraphine was already at her watch, a slight smile on her face that I took to mean her night had also gone well. The five of us moved through the morning’s preparations without any of us speaking. We did not need to speak. The day had begun. The work would begin shortly. The Vale lay below us, pale and dry and breathing its long exhaled breath.
We would ride down to it within the hour.
Good morning, reader. I am Balthazar. I am provisionally re-skinned. I am, for the first time in my life, carrying a grief that is not my own, on behalf of a people I never knew, toward an action I have not yet fully understood, in the company of four souls whom I have come — and I will write this down, and I will not mutter it this time — I have come to love. The muttering voice is not for this entry. The ordinary voice is. I will record: I love them. They have earned the loving. I have earned, I think, the giving of it.
The work begins. Let it begin.
Segment 15: The Last Hot Meal Before the Ruins
Now friend, I will set this down plain, because the evening I am about to describe is one of those evenings that a grandfather carries with him to the end of his days, and I am going to carry this one a long time yet, by the appearance of things, so I may as well set it down while the carrying is fresh. We had come down off the rim of the Vale that morning at dawn, the five of us, after our long sitting-with-the-feeling of the previous day and the peaceful sleep of the night between, and we had ridden into the bowl in the slow careful way a party rides into a country whose air behaves differently from the air of the country they have come from. The descent had taken us the full morning. Not because the descent was steep — it wasn’t — but because each of us, without saying so aloud, had wanted to take the country slowly, to let our lungs adjust to the salt-dry breath of it a little at a time rather than all at once, and because our horses, bless them, had wanted the same thing, and had picked their way down the terraced slope with the kind of careful hoof-placement a horse uses when she is walking on a ground that does not quite give back the feedback her hooves are accustomed to.
By noon we had reached the bowl’s floor proper, and we had crossed perhaps a mile of it eastward-to-center, picking our way between the scattered bleached rocks and the occasional slight mound where something long dead had been heaped up by a wind in some century long before ours, and we had found ourselves by about the middle of the afternoon within perhaps a mile of the first outer stones of the ruined city. The first outer stones, you understand, were the ruins of what must have been the city’s outlying houses — small crumbled squares of pale stone, barely knee-high, most of them reduced to the mere outlines of what had once been dwellings. The central lattice-building of the Silent Witness rose beyond them, perhaps three quarters of a mile further on, pale and broken and patient. We stopped, on an unspoken agreement that Ysolde signaled first by reining Muirne in, perhaps a quarter-mile short of the outermost stones, and we looked at what lay before us, and we were all of us quiet for a long moment, because the ruins at this distance were no longer an idea but a concrete thing, and the concrete thing was going to be entered on the morrow.
And this, friend, is where I surprised the party, and surprised myself a little too, by saying what I said.
I said, “We’ll camp here tonight and tomorrow morning both. And I’ll cook.”
Aldric looked at me. He was a scholar, and scholars are trained to take a statement and unpack it in their mind before responding, and I watched him unpack. He said, “Goodman Whittlehouse. I beg your pardon. Camp for a full day before proceeding?”
“Camp from now until the following dawn,” I said. “That’s a night, a full day, and a second night. We enter the ruins the morning after tomorrow.”
“A delay of a day and a half,” said Seraphine, in the low considered voice she used when she was working through implications. “Master Whittlehouse, may I ask what has prompted this?”
“You may ask, lass,” I said, “and I will tell you. The reason is that I mean to cook you a proper meal. And a proper meal, with the kettle I carry and the herbs I still have in my pack and the last of the good beans I’ve been saving since Haverfold, takes longer than one evening to make right. It wants a slow simmer of eight hours minimum, it wants the herbs to be crushed and steeped and then added in a particular order at particular hours, and it wants a cook who is not rushing to break camp in the morning. I could make you a hasty version of it tonight. It would be a fine enough supper. But I am not cooking you a hasty version tonight. I am cooking you the proper version tomorrow. And the proper version starts this evening with the soaking of the beans and continues through tomorrow morning with the first long simmer and through tomorrow afternoon with the addition of the herbs, and tomorrow evening you sit down to the meal I mean you to sit down to before you enter the ruins on the morning after.”
Balthazar, who had been silent, grunted. “Balthazar would like it noted that Balthazar is not opposed to this plan. Balthazar notes, for the record, that Balthazar has been looking forward to one of your slow-cooked suppers for eleven days, and Balthazar would rather enter a haunted ruin on a full proper stomach than on an ordinary rushed stomach.”
“Seconded by Balthazar,” said Ysolde, laughing softly. “Though I wouldna have put it quite that way.”
Aldric said, “Goodman Whittlehouse. I will accept the plan. But I would ask — is there another reason you are proposing the delay?”
I looked at him. Aldric had, as I have noted before, his moments of sudden shrewdness, and this was one of them. I did not try to hide from his question. I said:
“There is another reason, Brother. The other reason is that I am not yet ready to send you four into those ruins, and a day and a half’s pause will give all of us time to be as ready as we are going to be, and will give me time to cook what I mean to cook, because what I mean to cook is not just a meal but a particular kind of meal which has a particular kind of purpose, and if I do it right the purpose will be served, and if I rush it the purpose will not be served, and I am not going to rush it.”
Nobody asked me what the particular purpose was. Nobody needed to. A grandfather who announces he is going to cook a particular kind of meal before a hard piece of work has announced, by the announcing, that the meal is going to be a certain kind of meal, and the party receives the announcement in the spirit it is given, and I have known many good parties in my time and they have all, without exception, understood this kind of announcement when it is made by the grandfather at the fire.
So we made camp, on that pale dry ground at the edge of the outer ruins, in a hollow we chose for the windbreak of three scattered bleached rocks and for the faint depression where, I suspected, there had once been a small pond in the dead centuries before the bowl’s desiccation. The horses we picketed close, because the grass of the bowl was, of course, nonexistent, and the horses would need to be fed entirely from the grain we carried and watered entirely from the water we carried, and that was going to be a significant chore over the day and a half of our stay. Ysolde took it upon herself without asking. She always takes such things upon herself, and I do not stop her, because stopping her would rob her of the satisfaction, and Ysolde’s satisfactions are one of the small steady pleasures of this party.
I set my kettle on its iron trivet. I kindled the fire — small, controlled, the cooking fire of a man who intends to maintain the same fire for thirty hours rather than the throwaway fire of a man who intends to break camp in the morning. I laid out my cook-kit on the flat rock that would serve as my prep surface. I took out my last bag of dried white beans — a full two pounds, which I had been carrying since Haverfold, and which I had been protecting against Ysolde’s occasional hungry glances by keeping the bag tucked inside a second oilcloth wrap within my personal saddlebag — and I set it to soak in a wooden basin of the spring-water we had drawn from the grasslands that morning, because the water from the old pond-depression in the hollow was not water I was going to trust for cooking, and we had enough reserve to use the clean stuff.
Then I set about the laying-out of the herbs.
Friend, I will tell you about the herbs, because the herbs are the heart of the matter, and if you do not understand the herbs you will not understand the meal.
I have been collecting herbs for one particular stew for a very long time. Not all of the herbs go into it every time. There are fourteen herbs on my master list. On any particular occasion of making the stew, depending on the season and the party and the weight of the work being done, I select between six and nine of the fourteen. Tonight — that is, tomorrow — I was going to use nine. I set them out on my prep rock in the order I would use them.
The first herb was rosemary. I have a bundle of it I cut myself in a garden behind an inn at a port-town about forty miles east of where I had been living, the last spring I lived there. The rosemary is dry now, but it still carries the full oil, because I kept it in a sealed jar. Rosemary is for remembrance, the old saying goes, and that is only half its virtue; the other half is that it settles the stomach of a traveler who has been on the road too long, which is every traveler who ever lived.
The second herb was thyme. Common garden thyme, but cut from a thyme plant that a woman I knew had grown on her kitchen windowsill for twenty-two years. She had given me a cutting in her old age, and I had dried the cutting’s first harvest, and the thyme I carried was now some eight years dried but still fresh in scent when crushed.
The third herb was a bay leaf. One bay leaf. I carried exactly three bay leaves in my small leather pouch, each one carefully wrapped in its own wax paper, and I used one per stew of this kind, because bay leaves are precious and because I have been known to make this stew only three or four times a decade and I did not want to run out.
The fourth herb was sage. Garden sage. Nothing unusual. But the sage was from a bush at the back of a cottage I had lived in for four years with a woman whose name I have long since stopped saying aloud, and the sage, while it was not a magical herb, was a remembering herb for me, and remembering herbs go into this stew.
The fifth herb was a small pinch of fennel seed. Fennel for digestion. Fennel for the slight anise note that opens up the other flavors.
The sixth herb — and here I had to stop and consider, because the sixth is where my particular choices start to diverge from the ordinary stew-making — the sixth was a dried piece of a root I had been given, many years ago, by a woman I met on a road I shall not name, who had said only that it was a root her grandmother had called comfort-root, and that a small piece, ground to powder and added to a simmering pot, would gently encourage the speaking of hearts around the pot. The root was not magical in any dangerous sense. It was, as the woman had described it, an aid to the kind of conversation that parties need to have and often cannot have without help. I had been carrying a small piece of it, and the small piece had shrunk over the years with my various uses, but there was still enough for this stew, and I set the small piece aside on a clean square of linen.
The seventh herb was a single dried marigold flower. Just the one. Yellow, mostly faded now to a sort of dusty gold. Marigolds in a stew do nothing the cook can point to. But marigolds in a stew of this particular sort — my grandmother had told me when she was teaching me the recipe — marigolds call home the part of the heart that has been wandering in a far country. I did not know, fully, what that meant. I had used marigolds in stews of this sort for half a century, and I had always found that when I used them, somebody at the table was found, by the end of the meal, to have been carrying a grief or a worry of longer standing than they had been admitting to, and to have begun, without quite realizing it, to set it down. That was what my grandmother meant by calling home the wandering heart, so far as I could tell. I do not know the magic of marigolds, if there is one. I only know the practical effect. And in a party that was about to enter the ruins of a bound god’s lattice in the morning, I judged that wandering hearts needed calling home before the entering, so that no member of the party would go into the ruins with a piece of heart still out there in some country that had nothing to do with the work at hand.
The eighth herb was lavender. A wee pinch. Not for the flavor — lavender’s flavor is tricky and too much of it makes a stew taste of soap — but for the scent that rises off the simmer. Lavender scent in a kitchen is a scent that relaxes the shoulders of everyone in the kitchen. I have seen it work a hundred times. The party needed its shoulders relaxed. The lavender went in.
The ninth herb, finally, was the one I had hesitated over for three days and finally decided to include. It was a small dried sprig of something I had picked in Pell’s grove the morning we had departed, from a plant I had not recognized but that had pulled my eye to it as I was leaving, and I had asked Pell with my eyes only whether I could take a sprig, and Pell had nodded, also with only his eyes, and I had cut the sprig and tucked it into my inner pouch without speaking of it to anyone. The plant I still did not know the name of. But I trusted Pell’s grove, and I trusted whatever I had felt when I had looked at the plant, and I judged that whatever the plant was, it wanted to go into this stew, and so into the stew it would go, at the late hour, in the final addition, and we would see what it contributed.
That was my lineup. Nine herbs. Beans soaking. The small remnant of smoked pork I had been carrying in a sealed oilcloth since Haverfold, also for this purpose. Two onions from Pell’s kitchen-garden, which he had pressed upon me as I left, saying, “Tobin, the party will need onions. Take these.” Three carrots, also from Pell. A bulb of garlic. A small jar of Pell’s own honey. Salt, from the kitchen stocks I had replenished at the grove. A half-cup of a dark good ale that Pell had poured for me from a cask in his cellar and had sealed in a small ceramic jar with wax, which he had said would do well in a long simmer. And the kettle.
I will also tell you about the kettle, because the kettle is part of it.
My kettle is of clay, glazed in a deep brown, with a rim that has a hairline crack of some thirty-odd years’ standing, which I got the day I set it down too hard on a stone hearth in a moment of grief I do not here name. The kettle was a gift from a woman I loved who is dead now and whose name I carry in the inner pocket of the interior places and do not bring out. The kettle has been with me through two previous Vales, through four countries, through more inns and roadside fires than I can count. The kettle holds its heat unusually well. It has, I suspect, accumulated over the decades a certain character of its own — not magical, exactly, but what the old country folk used to call a broken-in character, where a thing has been used so long for one purpose that the thing itself has learned how to do that purpose better than any new thing could. The kettle cooks beans. The kettle holds the slow simmer of a long stew without losing its heat. The kettle remembers, in its clay, every previous stew it has held, and every new stew is made a little better by the memory of every previous one.
That kettle went on the fire at nightfall, with the soaked beans in it, and fresh water, and the first of the salt, and a quarter of the ale, and the single bay leaf, and the pork-scrap, and I set the trivet three inches above the coals, where the heat was gentle enough to simmer without boiling, and I banked the fire just so around the kettle’s sides, and I sat down to watch it with the satisfaction of a man who has begun a proper long cook.
The others busied themselves with their own evening work. Ysolde had finished the horses and was now sitting with her back against one of the bleached rocks, mending a strap on her saddle by the light of the fire. Aldric was, predictably, at his tome; he had been writing since we had settled camp, and had only paused twice, once to drink water and once to eat a piece of hard biscuit. Balthazar was in the middle of his usual obsessive gear-check, going through his saddlebags for the third time to confirm that every piece of equipment was in its proper place. Seraphine was doing her perimeter, and I watched her from my place by the fire as she walked the slow wide circle around our camp, her face composed in the particular middle-distance expression she wore when she was memorizing the terrain for possible later use. After she completed her walk she came and sat across the fire from me and she said, low, “Master Whittlehouse, may I help with the cooking?”
I was, I will admit, surprised. I had not expected Seraphine to offer. I said, “Lass, do you cook?”
“I was taught to,” she said. “In my fourteenth year. By a tutor whose name I do not speak aloud. The cooking I was taught was not the cooking of humble long-simmer stews, but I know my way around a kitchen, and if you would like me to chop onions, I will chop them to whatever specification you require.”
I considered. I said, “Onions chopped small, Seraphine. The small chop, not the diced chop. About the size of a rice grain. It matters for the texture.”
“Small chop,” she said. “Understood.”
I handed her the onions and the small board and the smaller of my two knives. She took them and went to the flat rock on the other side of the fire, and she sat down, and she began to chop the onions with a precision and a speed that made me raise my eyebrows at her. She chopped with the economy of a woman who had chopped many onions in her life, and the precision of a woman who had been criticized for every imperfect cut when she was being taught. I did not remark upon the technique. I simply watched her chop, and I felt, with the small private warmth that a grandfather-cook feels when he discovers that one of his party shares a practical skill he had not known she had, a new small affection for Seraphine de Valmont-Lissaria, which I added to the pile of affections I was accumulating for her across the course of the journey.
Ysolde looked up from her saddle-strap and saw Seraphine chopping and laughed, the small easy laugh she laughs when something has pleased her. “Seraphine. I didn’t ken ye’d cook.”
“There are many things you do not know about me, Mistress Kerrigan,” said Seraphine, mildly, “which I am sure I will have the opportunity to tell you over the coming weeks, as the needs of the meal require.”
“The needs of the meal,” said Ysolde, grinning. “I like that. The needs of the meal.”
Balthazar, from his saddlebag-checking, muttered, “Balthazar notes that the needs of the meal are currently inadequate because Balthazar is not yet chopping anything. Balthazar will chop carrots if anyone produces a carrot.”
I produced a carrot. Several, in fact. I handed them to Balthazar with the smaller board. Balthazar sat down beside Seraphine at the flat rock, and he began, with the intense concentration of a man who did not chop vegetables often and wanted to do it correctly, to slice the carrots into neat rounds. Seraphine, after watching him for a moment, said, quietly, “Master Vex. The slicing is correct, but you might tilt the knife at an angle — thus — to produce the half-moon shape rather than the full round. The half-moon holds its integrity better in a long simmer. The full round tends to break up.”
Balthazar tilted the knife. He produced half-moons. He grunted. “Balthazar is grateful for the instruction. Balthazar did not know this about carrots.”
“Few know it,” said Seraphine, gravely. “It is a small refinement my tutor insisted upon.”
Aldric looked up from his tome at this point and watched the two of them chopping at the rock together, and he closed the tome quietly and set it aside and he said, “Goodman Whittlehouse, is there anything I might assist with?”
“Aldric, lad,” I said, “can you mince garlic?”
“I can,” he said, “with some guidance.”
“Garlic is mincing very fine. Finer than the onion. You want it almost a paste by the time you are done, and then the juice that comes out of it goes into the pot along with the solids. Here is the bulb. Here is the knife. Here is a second knife, because you may find you like the chopping-and-rocking motion, which takes two hands.”
I gave him the bulb, the knives, the third small board. He sat down beside Balthazar and Seraphine at the flat rock. Three of my four companions were now chopping at the same rock, and Ysolde, seeing the formation, set aside her saddle-strap and came over, and she said, “Tobin. I’ll mix the spices.”
I laughed. “Lass, you know the mixing of the spices?”
“Aye. My gran taught me. She said a cook’s hands ken the right proportion in a way no recipe can tell ye, and she had me practice with her own stews from the time I was seven. I willna overdo it. Give me your thyme and your rosemary and I’ll crush them together in the ratio I think they want and I’ll add the fennel and the sage and I’ll hand ye the bowl when it’s ready.”
“Lass,” I said, “take the herbs.” I passed her my bundle. She took them to a fourth small rock at the edge of the firelight, and she sat down with her little mortar — she had, I noted, brought her own mortar, which she had carried in her saddlebag since Haverfold, and which I had not known about until this moment — and she began to crush the herbs with the slow patient rhythm of a woman who had crushed many herbs in her life and did not rush the crushing.
And so, friend, for perhaps forty minutes, the four of them worked at their three rocks in the firelight, while I sat by the kettle and watched the first simmer of the beans and kept the fire at its correct low heat, and the conversation among them was small and easy and about the work of the chopping and the crushing, and the conversation was the best kind of conversation a party can have in the evening before a hard day, which is the conversation that is not about the hard day but about the small immediate work of the hands.
When the chopping was done, I took the chopped onions from Seraphine. I took the sliced carrots from Balthazar. I took the minced garlic from Aldric. I took the crushed herb-mix from Ysolde. I added each in its proper order — the onions first, to sweat into the bean-liquid and the pork fat; then the garlic a few minutes later, because garlic added too early tastes bitter in a long simmer; then the herb-mix; then the carrots, last of the first additions because carrots can take a long cook without breaking down if they have been cut correctly. The kettle accepted each ingredient with the particular quiet welcome a good cook-pot gives to good ingredients. The smell that rose from it over the next hour was the beginning of what the smell was going to be, and the beginning was already good.
We ate a simple supper that first evening — bread, cheese, some dried sausage — because the stew would not be ready for another twenty-four hours, and the point of the stew was the next evening’s meal, not this one. But we ate our simple supper sitting around the fire with the kettle simmering at the center of the circle, and the smell of the slow-cooking stew filled the hollow and drifted up against the bleached rocks and mingled with the salt-dry exhalation of the Vale, and I will tell you, friend, that the smell of that stew took the edge off the smell of the Vale more than I had expected it would, and for the first time since we had crossed the rim, the air around our camp smelled of a living kitchen instead of a dead country, and each of my companions, I noticed, breathed a little easier in consequence.
We slept that night with the stew simmering. I had done the maths on the fuel and on the trivet-height and on the banking of the coals, and I had determined that the stew could simmer unattended for perhaps four hours at a stretch before requiring a small adjustment, and I set myself to wake three times in the night to make those adjustments, which I did. Each time I woke, I tended the fire, I stirred the kettle once with the long wooden spoon I carry, and I looked around at the four sleeping shapes of my companions in the firelight. Each time I looked, I felt the small old warmth in my chest that I have felt many times in my long life at the sight of souls I love sleeping under my care. It is a particular warmth. I will not try to describe it in more words than that, friend, because you will either understand it from your own life or you will not, and either way the description will not add to the understanding.
The morning came. We rose slowly. Breakfast was porridge, which I made in a small separate pot on the fire, leaving the stew-kettle undisturbed at its simmer. The stew-kettle, by morning, had reduced its liquid by about a quarter, and the beans had broken down just enough to begin thickening the broth, and the onions had melted into the liquid in the way properly sweated onions should melt, and the smell was now a richer smell than it had been the night before, and I did a small adjustment — a little more water, a pinch of salt, a small stir — and I let the kettle continue.
The morning of the stay-day, friend, was one of the most peaceful mornings I can remember from our whole journey. We did not ride. We did not pack. We did not scout. We simply were, at the camp, in our hollow, at the edge of the outer ruins, while the stew continued its work and the fire continued its gentle burn and the salt-dry country continued its ancient exhalation around us. Aldric wrote in his tome for several hours, filling many pages, and when he stopped he came and sat beside me and said, quietly, “Tobin. I have finished the preliminary draft of what I intend to say to the Silent Witness, should the Witness become communicable during the ritual. I would like to read it to you, at some point today, for your counsel.”
“This afternoon, Brother,” I said. “After the herbs go in. I shall be free to listen then.”
“This afternoon,” he agreed, and he returned to his tome to make one further revision.
Ysolde spent the morning with the horses and with her circlet. I saw her take it out of her inner pouch at one point, and hold it in her palm, and look at it. I did not ask. She put it back, after a minute. A bit later she came and sat beside me at the fire, and she said, “Tobin. It’s warmer today.”
“The circlet?”
“Aye. It’s not hot. But it’s warmer than it was yesterday.”
“Hm,” I said. “And what do you make of that?”
“I think,” she said slowly, “that the wood is paying attention. From far away. That it’s watchin’ what we’re about to do, and that the warmth is the grandmother leaning out the window.”
“That sounds about right, lass.”
“Aye.”
She sat with me for perhaps ten minutes more, neither of us speaking, and then she went back to Muirne, who had been looking for her with the patient insistence of a horse who is accustomed to being groomed at a particular hour and was not willing to let the hour pass uncommemorated.
Balthazar spent the morning, to my mild surprise, reading. He produced from his saddlebag a small leather-bound book I had not known he was carrying, and he sat in the shade of one of the bleached rocks, and he read slowly, turning a page every several minutes, his lips occasionally moving with the words. I did not ask him what he was reading. He would tell me if he wanted to. After perhaps an hour he closed the book and tucked it back into his saddlebag and he stood and he came over to the fire and he said, in his muttered voice, “Balthazar has been re-reading a particular book Balthazar has not read in forty years. Balthazar would like it noted that the re-reading has been unexpectedly moving, and that Balthazar will not elaborate further, but that Balthazar is grateful for the delay.”
“Noted, Balthazar,” I said.
He grunted. He sat. He stared at the fire for a while. I said nothing. He said nothing. After about twenty minutes he got up and went to check his gear again, because Balthazar checks his gear when he has had too much feeling and needs to do something concrete to work it off, and that is one of the things I love about Balthazar, that he has found a practical antidote to the overflow of his own heart.
Seraphine spent the morning — and this is the one that really surprised me — Seraphine spent the morning teaching Ysolde to read.
I mean more specifically that Seraphine, having discovered at some point during the journey that Ysolde could read the ordinary practical words of the road but not the fluent scholarly reading of the sort that enables a body to work through a long document, had, apparently without discussing it with Ysolde, decided to offer Ysolde a lesson. I did not hear the initial proposal. I only noticed, mid-morning, that Seraphine had brought out a small slate-board and a piece of chalk — I had not known she carried these either — and that she and Ysolde were sitting together at one of the flat rocks, and Seraphine was tracing letters with the chalk and Ysolde was copying them, and the two of them were speaking in low voices about the shape of the written word for “hedge” and how the shape related to the shape of the written word for “edge” and what this said about the way the letters of the language referred to the meanings of things. It was the gentlest and most patient teaching I had ever heard from Seraphine, and Ysolde was receiving the teaching with the quick interested attention of a woman who had always wanted to read better and had never quite had the time or the teacher.
I watched them from the kettle for a while. I did not interrupt. I said nothing. But I felt, watching them, the particular kind of gladness that comes of watching two people who came into a party as strangers and who have, across the course of the journey, arrived at the point where one offers another a thing of real value without it needing to be transactional, and the other accepts without it needing to be a burden. That is a milestone in the life of a party. That is a milestone worth noting. I noted it privately. I did not say anything to anyone. The milestone belonged to Ysolde and Seraphine. I was merely its witness at the kettle.
At about midday I added the fennel seed and the comfort-root to the stew. The comfort-root went in ground to a fine powder, just a pinch of it, and the fennel went in whole, because fennel releases best when its whole seeds are simmered and then fished out at the end. I stirred. I tasted, with a wooden spoon. The stew was now, I judged, at about the seventy-percent mark of its eventual flavor. Another six hours and it would be ready.
Early afternoon I called Aldric over and he read to me his preliminary draft of what he intended to say to the Silent Witness. I listened. The draft was dense with scholar’s phrasing and full of conditional clauses and diplomatic softeners, which was fitting for addressing a bound god, but it was also, I thought, a little too much of Aldric’s brain and not quite enough of his heart. I told him so, gently. I said, “Brother, the Witness is not a scholar. The Witness is a pooled attention of three hundred thousand minds who contributed themselves across sixteen centuries to a lattice and who were then bound by a ritual of their civilization’s own design. What the Witness will want to hear is not a diplomatic paper. It will want to hear an honest address from a soul who has come to it with some degree of understanding and some degree of care. Speak to it plainly. Tell it who you are. Tell it who we are. Tell it what you have understood about its situation. Ask it what it wishes. Listen to its answer. That is the speech I would give, if I were you.”
Aldric listened. He did not argue. He thought for a long moment. Then he said, “Tobin, you are right. I have been writing to a guild committee, which is what I know. The Witness is not a guild committee. I will revise the draft with your counsel in mind.”
“Take your time, Brother. You have the rest of today and tomorrow morning and the ride to the lattice. You will arrive at what to say.”
He nodded. He went back to his tome. He opened to a fresh page and began again.
Late afternoon I added the sage, the lavender, and the sprig from Pell’s grove. The sprig, which I had not identified, released upon contact with the hot broth a scent I had not encountered before — a green note, sharp and fresh, almost the scent of new rain on a spring field, which did not belong in a bean-and-pork stew by any usual logic but which, somehow, combined with the simmered onions and the comfort-root and the rosemary in a way that made the whole pot smell, suddenly and unmistakably, of home.
I do not mean my home. I mean Home. The capital-H home that every soul carries inside them regardless of where they actually grew up. The scent was of a home I had never lived in, but which I recognized as home the moment the scent rose from the kettle. I stood over the kettle and I breathed in the scent, and my eyes, for reasons I did not immediately understand, welled up, and I did not bother to wipe them, because there was nobody at the kettle but me and there was no shame in a grandfather welling up at his own cooking.
But I noticed, a minute later, that Balthazar, twenty paces off at his saddlebags, had stopped moving and was standing with his face turned toward the kettle and was breathing in deeply and his shoulders had gone very still. I noticed, a minute after that, Ysolde at the horses had stopped brushing Muirne and was holding the brush in her hand and looking at the kettle across the distance of the camp, and her face had the expression of a woman who had just heard her mother calling her name from a great way off. I noticed, when I turned my head, Aldric at his tome had closed it — for the second time that day, which was unusual for him — and was sitting with his hands in his lap and his eyes on the kettle, and the scholar’s expression had gone entirely off his face and been replaced by a quieter older expression that I had not seen before on his features. And Seraphine, at the flat rock where she had been teaching Ysolde, was no longer teaching Ysolde because Ysolde had stopped her teaching several minutes before, and Seraphine was sitting with her chin on her crossed hands, her elbows on the rock, her eyes fixed on the kettle, and her face — friend — Seraphine’s face was doing the small softening below the glass that I had seen on it only once before in this whole journey, and there was, at the corner of her left eye, a wet bead beginning to collect.
The sprig from Pell’s grove had done what it was going to do.
I did not say anything. I simply stirred the kettle once with the long wooden spoon and kept the simmer going and let the scent do its work. The scent filled the hollow. The four of them, at their various stations around the camp, slowly — one by one, without anybody giving any signal — set down what they were doing, and got up, and walked over to the fire, and sat down in their usual evening-log arrangement around the kettle, although it was not yet evening. The sun was still two hours off its setting. But the scent had called them, and they had come, and they sat, and nobody spoke for a long moment.
Ysolde spoke first. She said, softly, “Tobin. What did ye put in it?”
“A sprig from Pell’s grove, lass. I did not know what the plant was. I took it on Pell’s permission. It has just released its scent.”
“Oh,” she said.
She put both her hands over her face. She was not sobbing. She was weeping quietly, the way a body weeps when a scent or a sound has reached back a long way into them and pulled up something they had not expected. After a moment, she lowered her hands, and she said, “Tobin. That smells like my gran’s kitchen. That smells exactly like my gran’s kitchen on the Sabbath after her baking-day. I havena smelled that smell since I was eight years old.”
“I know, lass,” I said, softly.
“My gran was the kindest soul I ever kenned. She died when I was nine. I’ve been lookin’ for that smell all my life and I didna ken I was lookin’ for it.”
“I know, lass.”
Aldric, across the fire, said, in a voice I had not heard from him before — a voice without any scholar’s polish in it, just a plain voice — “It smells to me of the house where I was born. Which is not a place I have been able to remember, because my mother died before I was three, and the house was sold. But the scent is of that house. I am certain of it. I did not know I carried the memory.”
“Aldric,” I said, “you do. It has been there all along.”
Balthazar, then, spoke. He did not mutter. He said, in his full honest voice, without any of the third-person Balthazaring he ordinarily used, “It smells to me of the cathedral kitchen where I was raised. Between the ages of seven and fifteen. Before I went to sea. I have not spoken of that kitchen in forty years. The woman who ran it was named Sister Clemence, and she made a bread soup on Saturdays that the novices were allowed to eat in her kitchen rather than in the refectory, because there were never enough novices to warrant the refectory on Saturday, and Sister Clemence was a kind woman who preferred the company of the children to the company of the other sisters. The kitchen smelled the way this kettle smells. I have not thought of Sister Clemence in thirty-eight years. I did not know I was missing her.”
“Oh, Balthazar,” said Ysolde, softly.
Balthazar shrugged. He was not, I noted, embarrassed. He had simply said the thing he needed to say. He took a breath. He blew it out. He turned his face toward the kettle and did not speak further.
Seraphine, last, said, in a voice so quiet I had to lean forward to hear her:
“It smells of my mother.”
She said nothing more. She did not elaborate. She did not need to. She sat with her chin on her crossed hands and she looked at the kettle and the tear at the corner of her eye had, by now, traveled down her cheek, and it sat on her chin like a small clean bead of glass, and she did not wipe it, and nobody reached to wipe it for her, because we understood that it was not our tear to wipe.
We sat like that for some time. I do not know how long. Perhaps ten minutes. Perhaps twenty. The kettle simmered on. The scent continued. The afternoon light slanted lower, and the sun eventually began its real descent toward the western hills, and the pale sky of the Vale went through its series of dusk-colors, which were less gold-and-rose than the grasslands’ dusk had been but were still their own kind of beautiful, and the bleached rocks around our hollow acquired a faint pink cast from the slanting light.
Eventually I said, “I think the stew is ready. Shall we eat?”
“Aye,” said Ysolde.
“Yes,” said Aldric.
“Yes,” said Seraphine.
“Balthazar is hungry,” said Balthazar, in his ordinary voice, though his ordinary voice was, I noticed, a shade gentler than it had been before.
I ladled out the stew. I served it in our five tin cups, because tin cups were what we had, and the stew had been made for tin cups rather than for proper bowls, and I have always found that a stew served in a tin cup tastes slightly better than a stew served in a proper bowl, because the tin cup warms the hands of the eater in a way the bowl does not, and warmed hands eat more attentively.
I handed each of them their cup. I handed mine to myself last, because the cook eats last, that is the rule. I sat down in my place in the circle. I said, “Friends. To the stew.”
“To the stew,” said Ysolde.
“To the stew,” said Aldric.
“To the stew,” said Seraphine.
“To the stew,” said Balthazar, “and to Sister Clemence, wherever her dust has scattered.”
We drank the first sip. We chewed. The stew was, I will tell you friend, as good as any stew I have ever made. The herbs had done their work. The comfort-root had done its work. The sprig from Pell’s grove had done a work beyond my expectation, and the four souls around my fire were receiving that work each in their own register.
I will not narrate the conversation of the meal in detail, because the conversation was long and easy and wandered through many small and large matters, and because the conversation belonged to the meal rather than to any particular purpose I meant to serve by setting it down. I will tell you only the shape of it, which was this:
We spoke, first, of food. Of other meals we had each loved. Of the particular dishes of our various upbringings. Ysolde described her gran’s baking day in great detail, with tears coming and going as she spoke, and Aldric, surprisingly, asked many questions about the specifics of the recipes, and Ysolde explained them, and I listened.
We spoke, second, of mothers. Aldric’s mother, whose house he had just remembered through the scent. Balthazar’s Sister Clemence. Ysolde’s own mother, still living, in a village Ysolde had not visited in three years and whom Ysolde resolved, during the meal, aloud, to visit within the year after this business was concluded. And Seraphine — Seraphine did not speak of her mother at length. She said only, “My mother was a woman of considerable grace who did her best in circumstances that did not permit her best to be enough. I do not speak of her often. I will not speak of her now at length. I am grateful, Tobin, for the scent that brought her to me for this meal.”
“You are welcome, lass,” I said, and I did not press further.
We spoke, third, of the journey. Of the many small moments we had each privately treasured. Ysolde spoke of the watched mile, and of the silver-wire bird, and of the moment at the shrine in the wood when each of us had laid down our offerings. Aldric spoke of the night he had read the chapter at the fire and the four of us had heard him out. Balthazar spoke, with surprising eloquence, of the afternoon of his meditation on the canopy and the inverted ocean. Seraphine spoke of the evening she had catalogued Pell’s parlor. And I spoke, briefly, of the first evening at the Copper Kettle, when I had measured the four of them over the stew and had understood, within two hours, that they were going to be the party I had been waiting for.
We spoke, fourth and finally, of what lay ahead. And here the conversation grew quieter, but not fearful. We had, by the fourth round of the tin-cup stew, become a party so easy with one another that even the speaking of the coming ruins was no longer the daunting thing it had been at the rim. We spoke of Aldric’s revised draft for the Witness, which he now had a clearer sense of how to write. We spoke of Seraphine’s tactical preparations, which she had already completed in her head and was prepared to share when asked. We spoke of Ysolde’s scouting of the path from our camp to the central lattice, which she would do tomorrow morning before breakfast. We spoke of Balthazar’s plan for the horses, which he would tether securely in the hollow and fit with the noise-pouches he had designed weeks ago. We spoke of the tokens Pell had given us, each of which we now sensed we would know the use of when the hour came. And I spoke of the herb from Pell’s grove, which I had not recognized and which I suspected, now, was the particular plant whose purpose was the bringing-home of wandering hearts, and which had done its bringing-home tonight, and which had left the four of them — and me, for that matter — more at home in our own skins than we had been in days.
At some late hour of the meal, when the stew-pot was nearly empty and the moon had risen above the eastern rim of the Vale and was lighting the pale dust of the bowl with its faint cold glow, Ysolde put down her tin cup and she wiped her eyes one more time with the back of her glove and she said, in the voice of a woman who has come to a thing she has been working toward all evening without knowing she was working toward it:
“Tobin. I want to say something.”
“Say it, lass.”
“I love ye. I love the four of ye. I ken we’ve only ken’d each other a fortnight. But I love ye. I want ye to ken that. In case tomorrow or the day after goes wrong. I want the record to show that before we went into the ruins, I kenned what I had.”
There was a beat of silence. And then Aldric, in his steady scholar’s voice, said, “I return the sentiment, Ysolde. I return it to all of you. You have been the party I did not know I had been waiting for. I wish it recorded.”
And Balthazar, who was not a man given to such sentiments at all, said, in a voice that cracked very slightly at the edge, “Balthazar concurs. Balthazar loves the four of you. Balthazar has not said this aloud before. Balthazar is saying it now.”
And Seraphine, who did not weep in public and who had been close to weeping all evening, said, in her low level voice, not weeping, but with the full substance of her interior chambers present in the voice:
“I love you. Each of you. I have loved you for longer than I have known I was loving you, which is the most dangerous kind of love and the kind I trust. I will not say more. But I say this.”
They all, all four of them, looked at me. They waited.
I set down my tin cup. I took a long slow breath. I looked at the four of them in the firelight, at Ysolde with her red-rimmed eyes and her still-damp cheeks, at Aldric with his tome on his knee now closed, at Balthazar with his shoulders squared and his hands wrapped around his empty cup, at Seraphine with her chin on her crossed hands and the cool composed beauty of her face momentarily unguarded because the scent of the herb from Pell’s grove had unguarded it.
I said, “Children, I love you. I have loved you since the Copper Kettle, when I measured you and you measured me back. I have loved you more with each mile. I will love you as far as the road goes, and when the road ends for any of us I will love that one still. I have been waiting my whole long life for a party of this quality, and I did not think I would find one again, and I found one, and I am more grateful than I have the words for. I am an old fool with a kettle. I will tell you what I have been carrying. I will tell you tomorrow morning, after breakfast, before we enter the ruins. I owe you the telling. You have earned it. I will not postpone it further. Tonight, drink the last of your stew, and know that you are loved by your grandfather, and sleep.”
Nobody spoke. Nobody could. Each of them drank the last of their stew in the silence. Ysolde was crying openly now, not hiding it. Aldric was crying more quietly, with the small shoulder-shakes of a man who was not used to crying and who was, I think, not ashamed of it this evening. Balthazar was not crying. Balthazar was instead sitting very still, with his hands folded around his empty cup, and I could see his throat working, which was his equivalent. Seraphine was still composed, but her tear-bead had been joined by a second one, and the second had fallen onto her wrist, and she had not wiped it.
We sat like that until the kettle had gone cool. Then I gathered the tin cups. I rinsed them in the spare water. I banked the fire for the night. I made one last check of the horses with Ysolde. I walked back to the circle. Everyone had arranged their bedrolls. I arranged mine. I lay down. I pulled up my blanket. I looked up at the strange Saṃsāran stars above the pale hollow at the edge of the dead country.
I said softly, mostly to myself, “Good night, children. Tomorrow we eat breakfast. Then I tell you. Then we enter.”
Ysolde said, from her bedroll, “Good night, Tobin.”
“Good night, Tobin,” said Aldric.
“Good night, Tobin,” said Seraphine.
“Good night, Tobin,” said Balthazar.
I closed my eyes. The kettle at my back still carried the last whispers of its long simmer in the clay of its sides, and I heard, somewhere far off in the bowl, the first small sound I had heard from the Vale since our descent — a kind of soft deep hum, very faint, almost at the edge of hearing, the sort of hum a very large bell makes for many minutes after it has been struck once and the striker has long since departed.
The Silent Witness, I suspected, had noticed that we were here.
I did not speak of the hum to the party tonight. The hum would keep until morning. Tonight was for the meal. Tonight was for the loving. Tonight was for the weeping that had broken through the weeks of fear and for the softness that had come with the weeping.
I slept. I slept deeply. I slept better than I had slept in a month. And somewhere in whatever corner of the multiverse she occupied, the ghost of my grandmother, who had taught me the recipe, nodded once in approval, and went back to whatever she was doing, which was probably arguing with another dead person about the correct name of a goat, and the night closed over all of us, and the stew was finished, and the party was, in its full form, at last ready for the work of the morning.
Good night, friend. The kettle is cool. The fire is banked. The stars are strange. The Vale is humming, faintly. My children sleep. I have told them tomorrow. I will keep my word.
Good night.
Segment 16: Of the Finding of the Sunken Gate
Now herken, gentils all, and lend me ear, For of a finding I have news to share, Which fell upon us on the mornings twain That followed Tobin’s meal and Tobin’s train Of words thereafter. I will briefly catch The reader who hath missed my earlier patch Of chronicle. The stew had been consumed. The fyve of us had wept, and had illumed Each other with such confessions as the sprig From Pell’s small grove had drawn from each. The big Strange scent had come and had gone. We had slept. We had slept well, which after long un-kept Rest in the rim-hollow had been a gift. And in the morning, after the sun did lift Itself above the eastern hills, we rose To eat the breakfast Tobin had proposed And to hear the telling he had promised at last Of what his own long history had amassed Across the decades and lives he had declined Hitherto to name. I shal not here design To set down Tobin’s telling, for it is his And I shal not appropriate its business Unto my chapter. Suffice that he spake Plain and slow of the two preceding makes Of binding-party he had been member of, Of which beloveds he had lost in each, of The long centuries of his waiting for a third Gathering that might complete the work deferred, Of his trust in our fellowshyp at this hour, And of his full consent to whatever power Of decision we fyve together should arrive at When the moment of decision came, or what. He spake for perhaps an hour. We listened. None Of us interrupted him. When he was done, None of us spake either. Ysolde wept a little, And reached over and took his hand, and Tobin’s little Grip on hers was the grip of an old man who hath At last been permitted to lay doune half his path Upon the shoulders of souls who can bear it with him. We each thanked him. We breakfasted. We went then to trim Our gear for the day’s entry, and to set the horses At the tether, and to commence, by our own forces And on our own feet, the approach to the sunken ruins.
Ysolde went ahead. Ysolde always goes ahead. The moons Of her scouting had, over these past days, become the established Fact of our movement. I came second. Balthazar, vested With his flat green stone in his inner pocket, came third. Tobin came fourth, his kettle left at the camp, a rare third- Day in which he walked without the kettle. Seraphine came fifth, In her light silent tread, her dagger-pin re-pinned. We had as gift From Pell a small oilcloth packet of his jar — the three-times-daily Tincture for the Vale’s air — which Ysolde had doled out in a smiley And unceremonious manner at breakfast, and each of us carried Our dose upon the tongue, which settled the lungs against the harried Exhalation of the bowl. It was not a pleasant taste. It was tolerable. It was, I will note, effective; the breath came easier, and no audible Complaint from any member of the party was heard throughout the walking.
We reached the outermost ring of the ruins after an hour’s walking, And I will here describe them more closely, for the earlier view From the rim had been at too great distance to permit the view Of particulars. The outer ruins were, as I had noted before, the ruin- S of small outlying dwellings — cottages, perhaps, or workshops in the ruin- Time had once stood. The pale stone of their walls, now no more Than knee-high, was of the same grown-granite that Pell had used for the floor And walls of his own cottage, which confirmed that the technique Pell had Preserved was indeed the technique of the Vale’s builders. The stone had Resisted the eight thousand years of the bowl’s depleted weather with Remarkable success; only the exposed upper surfaces had worn doune. The pith Of each structure’s foundation remained clearly traceable. We could, from the outer Ring, step into and around the ghost-footprints of a neighborhood. No shouter Of long-dead greetings, of course; no smoke of cooking; no children; no dog; No sign of any life, past or present. Only the stone, and the dust, and the fog Of silence that lay upon everything like a thin gray shroud.
We progressed inward. The ruins grew progressively larger and more endowed With their original height as we went. What had been outer dwellings became Middle-quarter shops and workshops and small civic buildings of unrecognizable aim. What had been those became the larger buildings of what I judged to have Once been the city’s administrative quarter, a block of pale-stone halls whose grave Columned facades still stood to perhaps the height of a man, though the roofs had long collapsed. And beyond those, as we came nearer to the center of the ruin-field, the lapsed Grandeur of the lattice-temple itself began to dominate the view. The central structure. The pale columned ruin. The broken-latticed roof of the Silent Witness’s construction. It stood perhaps three-quarters of a mile further on, and its height, even ruined, was imposing: Perhaps sixty feet at its tallest remaining column, with the original roof-lattice composing A pattern of broken struts above, through which the pale dim filtered sunlight of the Vale Now descended in uneven patches, striking the dusted floor of the temple’s bale Interior with a diffuse broken light that I could not quite see properly at this distance.
But I have gotten ahead of my own narrative. We did not at first approach the central instance Directly. Ysolde, with her usual scout’s care, had asked us all to pause at a certain halfway Point, perhaps halfway between the outer ring and the central structure, because she had deliberately way- Pointed us to approach the center by way of a roundabout path, so that we might first observe The field as a whole from an intermediate perspective before committing to our final moves. We paused. We stood. We looked about us.
And it was at this pause, my gentils, that the finding of the sunken gate began.
I shal tell it plainly. I was standing at the southeastern corner of the intermediate ring, Facing what appeared to be a low broad hillside rising perhaps twenty feet above the prevailing Ground level of the bowl’s floor. The hillside was pale, and dusted with the same bone-white Dust as the rest of the bowl, and appeared at first inspection to be a wholly natural sight — A gentle rise of the ground, of the kind that occurs in any subsidence basin where the Original terrain had some small local irregularity before the depletion zone erased the Surrounding features. My eye had passed over this hillside several times on the walk in, And had registered it as unremarkable. I had not bothered to examine it. But in this pause, with The party standing together for our roundabout survey, I happened to turn my head such That my pilgrim’s cowl — which, reader, is one of Pell’s items, though I should note it had been such Since the Guild first bestowed it upon me at the High Hall, having been originally made By Pell’s own hand centuries ago, as I had learned at his cottage — my cowl pulled aslant shade Of sunlight across the hillside before me, and in that shifting of the light I saw it.
I saw, for perhaps a full second before I understood what I was seeing, the outline of it.
Letters. Upon the hillside.
Not letters carved upon stones set upon the hillside. Not letters inscribed upon a facing. Letters — large, looping, faded almost to nothing, but unmistakably letters — racing Across the whole face of the hillside, in a single broad inscription perhaps thirty feet wide And perhaps fifteen feet tall, written in a script I did not recognize but the curves of which belied The possibility that the hillside before me was a hillside at all. Because letters of that scale Do not accrue upon natural hillsides. Letters of that scale are carved by intention into the pale Face of something that was made to be written upon. The hillside was not a hillside. The hillside Was a thing. A thing that had a face. A thing whose face bore an inscription. A thing that had lied To my cursory inspection by the simple expedient of having been buried and dusted by eight thousand Years of accumulating bowl-sediment, such that the ordinary eye — and mine had been ordinary, and abandoned Its scholar’s precision in the general press of arriving — had taken it for natural topography.
The cowl’s property — the one Pell had mentioned: reveals spectral writing on stone within ten feet of topography — Had activated, though I had not called upon it consciously. The cowl had pulled at the light in a way That made the faded script visible to me for perhaps one full second as I turned my head at an angle that was, say, Sixty degrees to the sun’s present position and perhaps ten degrees to the hillside’s face. One second of revelation. I would not have been able to reproduce the angle deliberately if I had tried. But in that one second, the habitation Of my scholar’s eye had registered what the eye saw, and the eye had passed the information through to the reading Part of my brain, and the reading part of my brain had said, instantaneously: there is writing there. I stopped treading Forward entirely. I stood still. I called out, in my ordinary scholar’s voice but pitched to reach the party:
“Friends. Hold. I have seen something.”
The four of them turned. Ysolde came first to my side. “Brother?”
“The hillside,” I said, pointing carefully. “It is not a hillside. It is a thing. A thing with a face. And the face bears an inscription. I saw it for only a second, when the cowl turned the light askace, But I saw it, and it is real, and we should investigate.”
Ysolde squinted at the hillside. She said, “I see a hillside, Aldric. But you’ve been right about such things more often than not since we started this journey, so I’ll believe you. Can you show us?”
I tried to reproduce the angle. I turned my head to various positions. I tilted the cowl. I walked a few paces to the left, then a few to the right. For a long anxious moment, I could not recover the view. I could see nothing but the pale dust of the hillside. And then — and this was a practical detail I should note — I remembered that the cowl’s active was not merely passive but could be consciously invoked, and I invoked it with the small interior focus Pell had taught me at his cottage that last morning. I spoke the one quiet word of invocation under my breath, and the cowl’s cloth rustled slightly against my shoulders, and the light seemed to bend very slightly around my angle of view, and suddenly — as plainly as if the inscription had been refreshed that very morning by a careful scribe — the letters appeared.
They appeared not just to me. They appeared, I understood, to the whole party now, because the cowl’s active, when deliberately invoked, did not merely enhance my own vision but briefly cast a visible glow upon the script it illuminated, such that any observer looking at the hillside could see the letters for as long as the active was in play. Ysolde gasped. Balthazar muttered, “Balthazar will be plucked. That is writing.” Seraphine inhaled sharply and stepped forward, her full attention now engaged. Tobin said, softly, “Oh. Oh, goodness. I had never seen it on this side of the bowl.”
“You had seen it before, Tobin?” I asked, quickly.
“On the northern side, Brother. Once. In my previous coming. The inscription there was different — in the same script, but different words. I had not known there was a southern gate as well. This is new to me.”
“A gate?” said Balthazar. “Did ye say gate?”
“The inscription marks a gate, Balthazar. The face of the hillside is the façade of a gate into the underground city.”
Now I must stop the narrative, reader, and inform you of a thing I had not fully appreciated before this moment, which was that the ruined city we had been walking through was only the surface city. The true bulk of the civilization, it turned out — and this Tobin now explained to us in a few quick sentences as we all stood staring at the revealed inscription — had been underground. The surface buildings we had seen were the upper floors of a far larger subterranean complex, most of which had been buried by the depletion zone’s slow accumulation of dust and debris across eight thousand years. The gates into the underground — of which Tobin now said there were three, at cardinal approaches, north, east, and south — were the access points to the true city, which extended downward through many levels and included, at its deepest point, the primary lattice-chamber of the Silent Witness. The central surface structure — the columned ruin we had seen from the rim — was merely the uppermost and most visible part of the lattice-temple. The core of it, and the heart of the Witness’s binding, lay beneath.
“Why did the chapter not mention this?” I asked Tobin sharply.
“Because the chapter’s editor,” said Tobin, “did not want the Guild’s field-party to understand the scale of what they were entering until they were already inside. The chapter wants you to imagine a quest into a ruin above the ground. The actual quest is into an underground city whose dimensions the Guild has never publicly disclosed. The gates are marked, for those who know to look. But only for those. Pell’s cowl, Brother — it was designed by a man who knew the gates were there and who wanted any bearer of the cowl to be able to find them when they needed to.”
I understood, in that moment, reader, a new and considerable gratitude toward Pell. He had sent us into the Vale with a party-member — myself — equipped with an item whose first active was specifically the revelation of the gates. This had not been coincidence. This had been Pell’s long seeding. I added it to my mental accounting of Pell’s interventions on our behalf, and I made a note that I owed Pell a quite substantial thank-you that exceeded the ordinary limits of such thank-yous, and which I would, if I survived this business, attempt somehow to pay.
But to the inscription. The inscription, as the cowl’s active held the letters in visibility for what I judged to be a window of about ninety seconds — longer than I would have expected, though the active’s duration seemed to be tied to my concentration rather than to any fixed clock — the inscription was composed of letters I did not immediately recognize, but which Aldric-I had, over the course of my scholarly career, seen in a small handful of texts. The script was the primary script of the Vale. The very eleven volumes I had glimpsed on Pell’s shelves. A script in which no recognizable character occurred twice, and which was composed primarily of curves and dots, and which I had never before had the opportunity to read in a full inscription of any length.
I could not fluently read it. Let me be honest. I had learned the script only to the point of identifying individual characters in isolated examples. But by the application of the small body of Vale-script vocabulary I had committed to memory, and by the further application of the tome’s small reference-table of Vale-script roots that Pell had included in the packet of materials he had given me at the cottage departure, I was able, during the ninety seconds of the active’s hold, to pick out enough individual words to construct a rough sense of the inscription’s message.
I read it aloud to the party, haltingly, working from left to right across the revealed letters, which in the Vale-script was not always the correct reading direction, but which worked in this particular inscription because the script had been arranged in rows.
The inscription read, approximately — and I will preface this with a caveat that my rendering is imprecise, and that a scholar better versed in Vale-script might produce a more exact translation at a later date — as follows:
“Here the threshold, here the seal, here the place where the listener’s attention ends and the listener’s dream begins. Pass not within except with consent. Consent requires word. Word requires intention. Intention requires understanding. Understanding requires care. Whoever passes within without these four has passed within against the dreamer’s will, and such passage is grievous to the dreamer, and the dreamer shall know, and the dreamer shall remember. Whoever passes within with these four is welcomed into the dreamer’s silence, and shall be permitted to traverse the listening-halls, and shall be seen by such fragments as remain. Go gently, listener. Return with care. The dreamer listens always, even in dream.”
I stopped reading. The active’s light on the inscription faded. The letters sank back into invisibility. The hillside-that-was-not-a-hillside resumed its plain appearance of a small unremarkable rise.
None of us spoke for a long moment.
Seraphine spoke first. Her voice was low and careful. “That is the instruction for the entry. The Guild would not have wished their field-party to read it, because the field-party would understand, from reading it, that the gate has a protocol of consent that the Guild has no intention of honoring.”
“Just so,” said Tobin.
“We shall honor it,” said Aldric-I, a bit more firmly than I had intended. “Shall we not?”
“Aye,” said Ysolde, at once. “We shall honor it.”
“I would not enter without honoring it,” said Seraphine. “My own professional instincts recoil at the thought of entering a space against the documented preferences of its dreamer. It is the same principle as entering a house against the preferences of its owner, except that the owner has not been consulted in eight thousand years. We shall consult now.”
“Balthazar concurs,” said Balthazar, with unusual gravity. “Balthazar notes, for the record, that Balthazar has spent his life being lectured by customs officers who insisted that proper protocol be observed at ports of entry. Balthazar has developed, in his old age, an unexpected respect for proper protocol at ports of entry, and Balthazar intends to honor this particular port’s protocol down to the last comma.”
Tobin said, “Friends. Before we honor the protocol — for we shall honor it, and we shall honor it carefully — let us first finish our survey. We know now that this is a gate. We know the inscription. We need to find the opening itself, which will be below the inscription, buried beneath the dust, and we need to understand what state it is in. It may be collapsed. It may be intact. It may be sealed by something other than time.”
“Sealed by something other than time,” said Ysolde. “Tobin. What do ye mean?”
Tobin’s face went a little grim. “The previous two gates I have seen, on other Vales, were sealed by what I can best describe as the accumulated disappointment of the lattice-bindings they protected. The bindings themselves, over millennia, exuded a kind of cold — not a physical cold, though a thermometer would register it; a moral cold, a mood-cold, the cold of a long-held grievance. This cold had, in both previous cases, taken on a quasi-physical quality at the gate-openings themselves, forming something like an ice-shield across the inner threshold that had to be passed through with some care before the gate could be entered. I expect something similar here. The Silent Witness’s binding is older and larger than the two I have seen, so the cold will likely be deeper and more substantial. But we will manage it. We have Pell’s tokens and several other resources at our disposal. I simply want you to be prepared for the experience.”
“The experience,” said Ysolde, slowly. “Of a cold that isn’t cold.”
“A cold that is a cold, lass, but a cold that is a mood as well as a temperature. You will feel it on your skin, and you will feel it in your chest, and the feeling in your chest will be the one that gives the most trouble. If at any point during our passage through the gate the cold-in-the-chest becomes unbearable, say so at once, and we will retreat and rest and try again. This is not a passage to be forced.”
“Understood,” said Ysolde.
“Understood,” said Seraphine.
“Understood,” I said.
“Balthazar is prepared,” muttered Balthazar, “to be cold. Balthazar has been cold before. Balthazar will mutter about it, but Balthazar will not be stopped by it.”
“Good, Balthazar,” said Tobin. “Let us proceed.”
We proceeded to the base of the hillside, which lay perhaps fifty paces from our current position. As we approached, I invoked the cowl’s active a second time, to keep the inscription visible to us at closer range. The letters glowed faintly in the air above us as we reached the foot of the rise, and the proximity of them to my head produced a small prickling at the crown of my scalp that I judged to be the active’s side-effect, but which did not impair my function.
At the base of the rise, beneath what would have been the middle of the inscription, we found what Tobin had predicted: the buried threshold of the gate itself. The dust and accumulated debris had piled against the gate’s façade to perhaps fifteen feet of depth, but the upper foot or so of the threshold-arch was visible just above the dust-line, once we knew to look for it. A stone arch of pale-granite, carved in a pattern similar to the grown-granite of Pell’s cottage, rising in a broad peaked curve that suggested an opening perhaps twelve feet wide and perhaps ten feet tall beneath the dust.
“We shall have to dig,” said Ysolde, practically.
“We shall have to dig,” agreed Tobin.
We dug. I want to record that the digging was not a brief matter. It took us perhaps four hours of hard labor in the pale dry heat of the Vale’s afternoon, with the five of us taking turns at the two short-handled spades we had packed for precisely this kind of contingency at Pell’s suggestion — Pell, again, had foreseen the need for spades — to clear the debris away from the threshold-arch and expose the full gate. We dug carefully, because we did not wish to damage any inscriptions or carvings that might lie beneath the dust, and we cleared the dust in piles to either side of the gate rather than into the gate’s own passage. The work was hot. The work was dry. The tincture we had been taking helped with the breathing but not with the exertion. We had to pause several times to drink water and to rest. But by perhaps the middle of the afternoon, we had cleared the threshold to its full extent, and we stood before the complete gate.
The gate was, reader, a sight.
It was not a single arch but a compound one. The outer arch, which we had seen from above, opened onto a short vestibule perhaps eight feet deep, beyond which a second and inner arch led into the true passage. The walls of the vestibule, once cleared of dust, revealed themselves to be covered from floor to ceiling in smaller inscriptions — a whole library of shorter texts carved into the pale stone, arranged in vertical columns of perhaps a foot wide each. I made a quick scholar’s assessment: the smaller inscriptions were, I judged, the names and contributions of those who had participated in the construction of the gate, or perhaps the names of those who had contributed their attention to the lattice in the earliest centuries of the Witness’s existence. A dedicatory wall. A record of contributors. The names of the pooled minds that had become, collectively, the Witness.
I stood in the vestibule and I read what I could of the smaller inscriptions. Most of them were individual names in the Vale-script, which I could not reliably pronounce but which I could trace with my eye. There were hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands across the full vestibule. I paused at one column at about chest height on the left-hand wall, and I recognized — or I thought I recognized — the pattern of a name that Pell had written once in a margin note of a manuscript he had given me to study at the cottage. The name of the Attendant of the Silent Witness. The woman in the silver-gray robe in the tapestry. Pell’s lost love.
I did not tell the party. The finding was not for me to broadcast. I traced the name silently with my fingertip, a scholar’s acknowledgment, and I moved on.
Beyond the vestibule, the inner arch opened onto a true corridor descending downward at a gentle slope. The corridor was of the same pale stone as the vestibule, and it descended perhaps twenty feet before turning a slight corner and disappearing from view. At the far end of what we could see, the corridor ended not in empty darkness but in a pale translucent barrier that reached from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall — a barrier that shimmered faintly, as though it were a thin sheet of frosted glass, but which I could tell from my position at the outer arch was not glass.
“The cold,” said Tobin, stepping up beside me. “There she is.”
“That,” said Seraphine, “is what you meant by an ice-shield.”
“Aye. That is the binding’s exudation. It will feel cold to the touch, but not cold enough to harm the flesh. It will feel colder to the chest, and the chest-cold is the one we must pass through with care.”
“How do we pass through it?” asked Ysolde.
“We walk through it, lass,” said Tobin. “It is not solid. It is a permeable barrier. You simply walk into it, and it passes over you, and you emerge on the other side. But the mood of the binding comes with you for a few moments as you pass, and the mood is the ancient grievance of the Witness, and it will press on your chest in ways you have not experienced before. The key is to walk through steadily. Do not rush. Do not stop. Do not turn back mid-passage. And speak the consent as you step in.”
“Speak the consent,” I said. “The protocol of the outer inscription.”
“Exactly so,” said Tobin.
“We shall each speak it,” said Seraphine.
“Aye,” said Tobin. “Each of us, in turn, as we step through. And we shall step through one at a time. I will go first, because I have done this before and I know what to expect. Aldric should go second, because Aldric’s cowl may help him read any inscriptions on the other side if there are any. Ysolde third. Balthazar fourth. Seraphine last, because Seraphine will want to cover our retreat if the unexpected occurs, and Seraphine has said herself many times that she prefers the rear position.”
“Agreed,” said Seraphine.
We stood at the outer arch of the gate. The afternoon light of the Vale was beginning to slant more steeply now, and the pale stone of the gate glowed faintly in the slant-light, and the dust we had cleared to either side made small pale hills of the work we had done. The inscription on the outer façade was no longer visible; the cowl’s active had lapsed while we dug, and I had not re-invoked it.
Tobin took a breath. He looked at us each in turn, the slow careful look he gave us in such moments. He said, “Friends. I ask once more before we step in. Are we ready to enter? Are we ready to honor the protocol of consent? Are we ready to commit to passing through the cold with full intention and care?”
“I am ready,” I said.
“I am ready,” said Ysolde.
“I am ready,” said Seraphine.
“Balthazar is, against Balthazar’s better judgment, ready,” said Balthazar, which was Balthazar for: yes, I am ready.
“Then let us step through,” said Tobin, “one at a time, and let each speak the consent.”
Tobin stepped into the vestibule. He walked to the inner arch. He stood at the edge of the ice-shield. He spoke, in a voice steady and plain and carrying:
“I, Tobin Whittlehouse, enter with word, with intention, with understanding, and with care. I come to the dreamer in consent. I come gently. I shall return with care. I ask the dreamer’s permission to pass.”
He paused. He waited perhaps three heartbeats. Whatever he heard or felt in those heartbeats — for I am certain he heard or felt something, because his face did the small grave settling it did when he had received an answer — he nodded, once, slightly, and he stepped forward into the shimmering barrier.
I watched him enter the cold. His body passed into the translucent shimmer and for perhaps two seconds was entirely obscured by it, the barrier pale and faint enough that I could still see the rough outline of him but not his features. Then he emerged on the other side, still walking at the same steady pace, and I saw his shoulders adjust — not tense, exactly, but settle into a particular grounded carriage that I took to be his response to the chest-cold of the binding’s mood. He walked three more paces and stopped and turned back toward us, and his face — reader — his face in the dim light of the passage beyond the barrier was the face of a man who had just greeted, as one greets an old friend, a thing he had been meeting across three lives.
“It is passable,” he called back to us, in his normal voice, which carried through the barrier clearly. “The mood is heavy but not unbearable. Come, Aldric. You next.”
I took a breath. I stepped into the vestibule. I walked to the inner arch. I stood at the edge of the shimmering barrier, and I looked at it. Up close, the barrier was not flat. It had a subtle depth to it, as though one were looking not at a pane of frosted glass but into the surface of a very still pond from above, with the depth of the pond continuing for some fathoms beyond the apparent surface. I could see, through the barrier, the blurred shape of Tobin standing on the other side, waiting.
I spoke the consent:
“I, Aldric Thornebane of the Veil, enter with word, with intention, with understanding, and with care. I come to the dreamer in consent. I come as a scholar, and as a reader, and as one who has learned what small portion of the dreamer’s situation my study has permitted me to learn. I come gently. I shall return with care. I ask the dreamer’s permission to pass.”
I waited. And I want to tell you, reader, that in those three heartbeats I felt — I felt, quite distinctly — a response. Not words. Not a voice. But a quality of acknowledgment, a kind of softening in the barrier before me, as though a door that had been ajar had been pulled slightly more open. The dreamer — if it was the dreamer who answered — did not speak. The dreamer granted, in a way that needed no words. I understood, in that granting, why the Guild had wanted to bypass this protocol. They had not wanted their field-party to feel the personal acknowledgment of a dreaming god, because that acknowledgment would have made the binding-transfer impossible for any party with a functioning conscience. Consent given cannot be rebounded in good faith.
I stepped forward.
The cold was — I will not lie — severe. Not to the skin, though the skin felt it. To the chest. The chest-cold was the cold of a very old grievance held patiently for eight thousand years by a consciousness that had been bound without its consent. The grievance was not hot. The grievance was cold. It was the cold of a winter lake that has not thawed. It was the cold of a house that has not been lived in for centuries. It was the cold of a heart that has not been answered. I felt, for the two seconds of my passage, the full patient ancient weight of the Witness’s waiting. I felt, within that waiting, the accumulated attention of three hundred thousand contributing minds, each of whom had loved something in their original life and had carried that love into the lattice, and each of whose loves had been suspended in the binding, neither fulfilled nor released. I felt, most piercingly, a wave of something I can only describe as loneliness — not the personal loneliness of one mind but the distributed loneliness of many minds pooled into one and then sealed into silence, with no listener to receive the speaking.
I walked steadily. I did not stop. I did not turn. I did not rush. I walked at Tobin’s pace, three deliberate steps, and I emerged on the other side.
Tobin caught my elbow, lightly, not to steady me but to ground me. “Aldric. Breathe.”
I breathed. I had not realized I had been holding my breath. The chest-cold lingered for perhaps another ten seconds after I emerged, and then, by slow degrees, it lifted. The ordinary air of the passage beyond the barrier was cool and still and faintly musty, the air of an underground place that had been closed off from ordinary circulation for a very long time, but it was not the mood-cold of the binding, and my chest unclenched with the lifting.
I turned. I looked back through the barrier. I saw, blurred, Ysolde approaching the inner arch. I raised my hand to her in a small gesture of encouragement. She nodded, stepped up, and spoke her consent:
“I, Ysolde Kerrigan of the Verdant Keep, daughter of Donal Kerrigan, I enter with word, with intention, with understanding, and with care. I come as a scout. I come as a friend of the green wood that stands not far from here. I come to the dreamer in consent. I come gently. I shall return with care. I ask the dreamer’s permission to pass.”
She waited. She received whatever she received. She stepped forward. Her passage took her the same two seconds, and I watched her shoulders do the same slow settling that Tobin’s had done and that mine presumably had done, and I saw her face as she emerged — her open Kerrigan face, her broad generous mouth, her moss-and-gold eyes — and her eyes were wet, but not with distress; they were wet with the particular weeping of a woman who has been welcomed. She stepped through to us, and she said, softly, “Oh. Oh, Tobin. They were kind to me.”
“Aye, lass. They are kind to those who come with consent. Welcome.”
Balthazar was next. He stepped up to the barrier with the set-jaw of a man who had resolved to do this thing and would brook no interference from his own fear. He spoke his consent in his ordinary third-person, which I suspect amused the dreamer as much as anything had amused the dreamer in eight millennia:
“Balthazar Vex, the Twice-Drowned, enters with word, with intention, with understanding, and with care. Balthazar comes from the sea originally, not from the land, but Balthazar has learned to respect the protocols of many ports of entry, and Balthazar respects this one. Balthazar comes gently. Balthazar shall return with care. Balthazar asks the dreamer’s permission to pass.”
He waited. He did the faint grave nod of a man who had been granted permission. He stepped through. His passage took him perhaps a half-second longer than ours had, which I attributed to his shorter legs rather than any hesitation, and when he emerged his first act was to reach into his inner coat pocket and press his palm over the flat green stone Pell had given him, and I saw his face register a small surprised expression, as though the stone had done something to him at the moment of his emergence that he had not expected. I did not ask. Balthazar would tell me, or not, at his own pace.
Seraphine was last. She stepped up to the barrier with the composed precision of a woman stepping onto a stage she had prepared for her whole life. She spoke her consent in her low continental murmur:
“I am Seraphine de Valmont-Lissaria of the Thrice-Masked. I enter with word, with intention, with understanding, and with care. I come to the dreamer not as a scholar, not as a scout, not as a cook, not as a sailor, but as one whose profession has been the reading of rooms, and who has read what the dreamer’s room requires. I come gently. I shall return with care. I ask the dreamer’s permission to pass.”
She waited. She received. She stepped. Her passage was, of us all, the quickest — perhaps a second and a half — because Seraphine walked with the particular economy of gait that she brought to everything, and she covered the three paces of the barrier before any of the rest of us had breathed twice. She emerged. Her face, as she joined us on the inner side, showed for a brief flashing instant an expression I had not seen on it before: a small girlish wonder, entirely unguarded, the expression of a child who had opened a door expecting a cupboard and had found a ballroom. The expression resolved, after perhaps two seconds, back into her ordinary composed attention. But I had seen it. I treasured it. I filed it.
We stood, all five of us, on the inner side of the ice-shield, in the cool musty air of the passage that descended into the underground city. We looked at each other. Something had changed, collectively, in the few minutes it had taken us each to pass through. We had each been individually greeted by the dreamer, and we each, I think, carried now a small private version of that greeting in our chests, a warm counterpoint to the cold of the binding. We were no longer merely a party approaching a ruin. We were a party who had been acknowledged, individually and severally, by the consciousness the ruin sheltered. And that acknowledgment — reader — that acknowledgment changed everything about what the remainder of our journey was going to mean.
Tobin spoke first, after perhaps half a minute of the silence.
“Well, friends. We are in.”
“We are in,” said Ysolde.
“We are in,” said Seraphine.
“We are in,” said Balthazar. “Balthazar notes, with some interior surprise, that Balthazar is not as afraid as Balthazar expected to be.”
“Nor I,” said Aldric-I. “Nor I.”
“Shall we proceed further today?” asked Ysolde. “Or shall we go back up and camp another night and enter deeper tomorrow?”
Tobin considered. He said, “I think we should proceed a short way further, to make sure the passage beyond is navigable and to find a suitable small chamber where we might leave a cache of supplies for our descent. But I think we should return to the surface to sleep, and come back in the morning for the deeper work. The dreamer has granted us entry. The dreamer will not withdraw the grant overnight. But the work of the deeper descent should be done with fresh strength.”
“Agreed,” said Seraphine.
“Agreed,” said Ysolde.
“Agreed,” I said.
“Balthazar agrees,” said Balthazar.
We walked perhaps another hundred paces into the passage. The slope continued gently downward. The pale stone walls of the corridor were covered, we now saw, in further inscriptions at perhaps five-pace intervals — short glyphic texts carved into the stone at chest height, the equivalent, I judged, of street-markers or wayfinding signs for the underground city. The passage turned the slight corner we had seen from outside, and beyond the corner opened into a small chamber perhaps twenty feet across, with a high vaulted ceiling and four exits leading further inward and downward. A crossroads of the city. A point of decision.
We did not take any of the exits. We stood in the small chamber. We looked around. The chamber was dusty but not ruined; the vault above was intact; the inscriptions on the walls were, if we chose to read them — and I would, tomorrow — the map of the deeper city.
Tobin walked to the center of the chamber. He stood there for a long moment, his head slightly inclined, the way a man listens for a faint sound in a forest. Then he said, softly, “The lattice-chamber itself lies about half a mile further in and about four levels down. The route is straightforward. We can reach it by midday tomorrow if we start at first light. The final approach will be through one more ice-shield of the same kind we just passed, though of greater thickness, because the lattice-chamber is the seat of the binding itself.”
“Another consent-passage,” said Seraphine.
“Another consent-passage. Yes. But by the time we reach it, the dreamer will know us. The second passage will be easier than the first, because we will not be strangers at that gate; we will be guests who have been walking the dreamer’s halls for some hours.”
“Good,” said Ysolde, softly. “That’s good to ken.”
Tobin turned back toward the entry passage. “Let us set down our cache here, and return to the surface. Tomorrow the deeper work.”
We each unshouldered our small secondary pack — we had been carrying primary packs with essentials and secondary packs with supplies specifically intended for the underground — and we set them against the northern wall of the small chamber, stacked neatly, to be retrieved at the morning’s work. Aldric — I — set my stack on top, and tucked a small slip of paper into my tome noting the chamber’s position relative to the gate, because a scholar does not rely on memory for such things.
We walked back up the passage. We passed through the ice-shield the opposite direction, each in turn, and this time — and I note it because it is worth noting — the passage was easier for each of us. The chest-cold was milder. The dreamer, I judged, recognized us now and was not pressing us as firmly. We emerged into the vestibule, and we emerged into the outer arch, and we emerged into the pale late-afternoon light of the Vale, and we stood at the cleared façade of the gate, and we squinted at the slanting sun, and we breathed deeply of the ordinary air of the bowl, which tasted sweet after the cool mustiness of the passage.
Ysolde laughed. It was the loud laugh. It was her full honest laugh. She did not hide it. She laughed, “Brothers and sisters, we did it. We’re in. Tobin, we’re in.”
“We’re in, lass,” said Tobin, and he laughed too, his slow grandfatherly laugh, the first honest laugh I had heard from Tobin in many days.
Balthazar permitted himself the chest-cough that was his laugh.
Seraphine did not laugh, but she smiled, and the smile was broader than her usual smile, and I saw on her face a contentment I had rarely seen there.
I — I, Aldric — I stood at the outer arch of the gate with my tome tucked beneath my arm and my quill still tucked into my inner pocket and the cowl around my shoulders, and I thought, with the full weight of my scholar’s satisfaction and my scholar’s awe:
I found the gate.
I, Aldric Thornebane, Brother of the Veil, have in my own time and by my own scholarship and by the aid of the cowl Pell made for me and by the quite remarkable providence that put me in this party in this hour with these four companions, I have found the sunken gate of the Silent Witness’s hall. I have read the inscription. I have spoken the consent. I have passed the ice-shield. I have stood in the first chamber of the underground city of the Vale.
I have done a thing very few scholars in the history of this world have done. I have done a thing fewer still have done while being addressed by the consciousness the city was built to house.
I have done it honestly. I have done it with my companions. I have done it in the service of the work that our party has taken upon itself, which is the service of a dreaming god whose consent has now been received at the threshold of its house.
I stood at the outer arch and I watched the pale afternoon sun slant across the broad pale dust of the bowl and across the outlines of the ruined upper city, and I felt, reader, the old old warmth of vindication that every scholar waits for all his life and that some scholars never receive. I felt it in my chest. It was not pride. Pride is a flimsy feeling. This was the deeper feeling of having been, in a small specific way, the right man in the right place with the right tools at the right hour. It was the feeling of having done the work I was made for.
Alongside this warmth — reader, I do not mind telling you — there was fear. A good clean reverent fear. The fear of having understood, finally and concretely, the scale of what we were about. The dreamer was real. The consciousness was real. The consent protocol was real. The cold of eight thousand years was real. The passage beyond was real, and descending, and would take us down through four levels to the lattice-chamber where the binding itself lay. Tomorrow we would enter it in earnest. Tomorrow we would walk those halls. Tomorrow the conversation with the dreamer would begin in the register the dreamer chose, not in the register we chose. Tomorrow we would be tested in ways we could not yet imagine.
But tonight — tonight was for the return to the camp, and for the evening meal, and for the quiet celebration of the finding, and for the sleep that would, I judged, be deeper and more restoring than any sleep we had yet had on this journey.
We walked back to the camp. The sun set behind the western hills of the bowl. The sky went through its dusk-colors. The kettle was on the trivet by the time we arrived, Ysolde having run ahead to kindle the evening fire — I had not seen her run ahead; I had only seen, when we arrived, that the fire was already burning and the kettle was warm. Tobin laid out a simpler supper than the previous night’s — bread, cheese, the last of the stew warmed in a small pot, which was perhaps the best stew I have ever eaten in my life because it had one further day of the flavors marrying in the kettle’s clay.
We ate. We did not speak much. We did not need to. The finding had spoken for us. The passage had spoken for us. The chest-greeting of the dreamer had spoken for each of us privately.
After supper, I opened my tome by the firelight, and I wrote the whole of the day’s record in careful detail, including the rough translation of the gate’s inscription and the shape of the passage and the quality of the ice-shield and the acknowledgment I had received within it. I wrote until my quill ran dry. I wrote until my hand cramped. I wrote until the others had all laid down on their bedrolls and the fire had banked low and only Seraphine was still awake at her perimeter-watch.
Seraphine, having completed her walk, came and sat beside me. She did not speak for a while. I finished my final entry. I closed the tome. I laid it beside me.
She said, softly, “Brother.”
“Sister,” I said.
“You did well today.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
“The cowl. Pell’s long seeding. Your scholar’s eye. All of these came together at exactly the right moment. I want to be sure you know that I noticed, and that I am grateful.”
“I am grateful also,” I said. “For the party that was around me when I saw the inscription. Without the four of you, the finding would have been an idle curiosity. With the four of you, it is the hinge of the work.”
“Yes,” she said, “that is precisely what it is.”
She sat a moment more. Then she said, “Goodnight, Brother.”
“Goodnight, Sister.”
She stood. She went to her bedroll. She lay down. I lay down shortly afterward.
I lay on my back. I looked up at the strange stars. The Inkwell — that faint smudge of the scholar’s constellation — was directly overhead now, paler than I had ever seen it, but visible, patient. I said, softly, only to myself:
“Gaialilith. Old mother. I found the gate today. I read the inscription. I spoke the consent. I passed the ice-shield. I stood in the chamber beyond. The dreamer acknowledged me. The dreamer acknowledged all of us. We return tomorrow for the deeper work. Let us do the deeper work as honestly as we did the work of today. Let the chapter read to its natural conclusion. Let us be, at the last, the party that performs the good work.”
The Inkwell did not answer. The Inkwell never answers. I did not mind. The speaking was sufficient. I closed my eyes. I slept. And in my sleep, reader, I want to tell you — because a scholar records his dreams when his dreams bear record — I dreamed that I walked the halls of a great library whose shelves were carved directly into the pale stone of an underground city, and on the shelves of that library were ranged the names of three hundred thousand contributors, and at a reading-lectern near the center of the library stood a woman in a silver-gray robe, and she turned as I approached and she smiled at me without speaking, and the smile was a greeting of the most ancient sort, and she held out her hand in the hand-clasp of a fellow scholar, and I took her hand, and in the taking of it I felt the full patient kindness of a consciousness that had been waiting eight thousand years for a reader to arrive who knew the meaning of consent, and the library around us extended, in every direction, into a depth I could not measure.
I woke, at dawn, with the dream still faintly in my chest, and I understood that the dreamer had been practicing with me, in my sleep, the register of the conversation we would have tomorrow at the lattice-chamber, and that the register would be courteous, and that the register would be scholarly, and that the register would be the register of my own trade, and that I had been chosen for my trade as specifically as Ysolde had been chosen for hers and Balthazar for his and Seraphine for hers and Tobin for his, and that the party in its full specific configuration was the party the dreamer had, in whatever slow patient way a dreaming god dreams, arranged to arrive.
I rose. The others were stirring. The dawn was pale and cool and the bowl was waking, as much as the dead bowl ever woke, to the new day’s filtered light.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning, Brother,” said Ysolde.
“Good morning, Aldric,” said Tobin.
“Good morning,” said Seraphine, with a small smile she did not often let show at dawn.
“Morning,” muttered Balthazar. “Balthazar has decided that this morning, Balthazar will not complain about the rising hour, because Balthazar has a feeling it would be impolite, given the hour’s importance.”
“Wise, Balthazar,” I said.
We broke our fast quickly. We packed the day’s smaller kits. We left the horses at the tether and the main camp in its hollow. We walked, in our usual line with Ysolde ahead and Seraphine at the rear, across the pale dust of the bowl toward the gate we had cleared the day before. The sun climbed. The filtered light of the Vale slowly brightened toward its best clarity of the day, which would come at about midmorning.
We reached the gate. We stood at the outer arch.
Tobin said, “Friends. We enter in earnest now. The halls await us. The dreamer awaits us. The lattice-chamber awaits us. Half a mile in. Four levels down. One more ice-shield at the end. Speak your consents at each threshold. Mind your chests. Mind each other. We go.”
We stepped into the vestibule. One by one, in our order, we passed through the ice-shield — more easily this time, because the dreamer recognized us now — and we stood again in the first small chamber of the underground city. The second day had begun.
I lifted my cowl. I invoked its active. The inscriptions on the walls of the chamber glowed faintly for me. I began to read them aloud to the party.
And so, reader, with the chronicler’s record continuing in my tome, with the scout in her green cloak leading us, with the blade at our rear in her plum velvet, with the twice-drowned sailor beside me muttering the names of depths he had not yet entered, with the old grandfather of three parties ambling at the heart of our column, and with the silent witness of a bound god listening patient in the dark below, the chapter proceeds.
Turn the page, gentle reader. The halls of the city stretch inward. We shal walk them.
Segment 17: The Descent and the First Echo
They had passed through the ice-shield for the second time at perhaps the sixth hour after dawn, by the reckoning of the bright sun above the bowl’s rim, though the light of the underground passage did not keep the hours of any surface day and she had already ceased, within the first twenty paces of their renewed descent, to consult the particular internal clock she maintained for above-world time and had begun instead to maintain a separate interior clock calibrated to the particular quality of air through which they now moved; the new clock ran, she had noticed, at a pace approximately seven-eighths that of the surface clock, which meant that an hour in the underground passage would feel to her, when they eventually emerged, as having been only fifty-two or fifty-three minutes, and she had accepted this calibration without pausing to interrogate it, because she had been trained by her long apprenticeships to accept such calibrations as data rather than as puzzles, and because the work at hand required her full attention rather than her speculation on the mechanisms of temporal compression within a god’s antechamber. They had, by her count, just passed the first crossroads-chamber they had cached at the previous afternoon, and were now some forty paces down the second passage, descending by a gentle slope lined on either side with the pale-stone walls of the inscribed corridor, and it was in these first forty paces of the second passage, walking behind all four of her companions, that Seraphine had begun the careful observational work that would occupy her for the whole of the day’s descent, and that she would, many years later, consider the most personally consequential watching she had ever performed.
For she had understood, by the time she had emerged from her own passage through the ice-shield the second time — understood it not as an intellectual proposition but as a felt thing, a thing settled low in her chest behind the dagger-pin — that each of the four souls now walking the passage before her was changing. Each was being changed. The underground air of the Silent Witness’s city was not inert. It was a medium whose properties acted upon the souls exposed to it in ways that the surface air did not, and the acting was not uniform across the four, but specific to each, and the specific changes were legible to an observer whose eye had been trained, as hers had been trained, to read the small physical signatures of interior shift.
She had not at first intended to observe them in this register. She had intended, on descending the second time, to attend to the threats: to the condition of the passage, to the structural integrity of the corridor, to the quality of the inscriptions as markers of the dreamer’s continued acknowledgment of their presence, to the possibility of traps or guardian-interventions, to the strategic question of which of the four exits from the crossroads-chamber led most directly to the lattice-chamber and whether the path Tobin had described as direct was in fact direct or had been subtly re-routed by the long-patient architecture to test them. These were the observations her professional training had prepared her to make, and she had made them, in the first twenty paces of the second passage, with the rapid efficient scanning that characterized her ordinary attention in unfamiliar interiors, and she had found, to her satisfaction, that the passage was sound, that the corridor was inscribed with the expected wayfinding glyphs, that Tobin’s described route was the actual route, and that no immediate threat was apparent.
Having completed the threat-assessment, she had permitted her attention to expand to the wider register. And it was in this wider register that she had begun to see her companions as they were now being altered by the air of the descent, and had begun to attend to each of them with the quiet anxious focus of a woman who loved — she would permit herself the word this morning, because the word was correct, because four souls walked ahead of her and she had, in the course of the journey, come to love each of them in the distinct register each required — a woman who loved these four souls and who was now watching them enter a medium that was changing them, and who did not yet know whether the changes would be bearable and was therefore required to observe the changes with a care that would permit her to intervene, should intervention become necessary, at the earliest possible sign.
She began, as she always began, with Tobin, because Tobin was the most experienced of them and therefore, in her tactical estimation, the most legible baseline; she would read his responses first and use them as the calibration against which to read the others’. Tobin walked at his ordinary grandfatherly amble, the kettle left at the camp for the day, his whittled stick in his right hand serving as a walking-aid rather than as the fighter’s weapon she had once seen it briefly become during the ambush on the trail. His gait was measured. His shoulders were relaxed. His head was slightly inclined forward, in the posture of a man attending to the sounds of his environment, but the inclination was the small ordinary inclination of active listening rather than the tenser inclination of a man anticipating threat. The whittled stick moved in easy rhythm with his stride. His free left hand swung at his side, relaxed, the fingers curled into the soft loose curl that indicates the absence of clenching.
But she observed, within the first hundred paces of the descent, a change in Tobin. It was not a change in his gait or his posture; it was a change in the set of his shoulders. They were not rising, as a tense man’s shoulders rise; they were settling, lowering by very small degrees as he walked. Each step into the deeper passage dropped his shoulders by perhaps a millimeter. The effect, accumulated over the first hundred paces, was that Tobin’s shoulders were now perhaps a full centimeter lower than they had been at the ice-shield, and the effect was continuing. He was relaxing into the descent. This was not the relaxation of a man approaching ease; it was the relaxation of a man approaching home. The passage’s medium was, to Tobin, familiar. He had walked such passages before. His body was recognizing, at the physical level beneath conscious thought, that it had returned to an environment it had previously inhabited, and the recognition was producing a slow steady release of the long tension Tobin had been carrying for — she did not know how long, but certainly longer than she had known him.
She made a private note. Tobin’s shoulder-drop was a useful baseline. If any of the other companions exhibited shoulder-drop at a similar rate, it would indicate that the descent was also familiar to that companion at some deep level, and would give her a diagnostic for the question of whose previous lives might have included residence in places like this. She did not expect such drop from the others. She expected other signatures. She continued observing.
Aldric walked second in the column from her rear vantage, though he was third from Ysolde’s lead. Aldric had been, at the ice-shield’s emergence, slightly pale — the ice-shield’s chest-cold had registered on his face for some three to five seconds longer than it had on the others’, which Seraphine attributed to his scholar’s tendency to process sensations through interpretive layers that took additional time. Now, walking the second passage, he had recovered his color, and he was walking at his usual scholar’s gait, which she had long since catalogued as a gait composed of equal parts attentiveness and distraction, the feet moving steadily while the attention hovered above the feet. His head was turning, now right and now left, scanning the inscriptions on the passage walls as they walked, and she could hear him, through the quiet of the descent, murmuring under his breath — not words, but the rhythmic soft murmur of a scholar reading aloud to himself in miniature. He was reading the wayfinding glyphs. He was, without a trace of awareness that he was doing so, reading them faster than he had been able to read them yesterday; the previous afternoon, she had watched him pause at each inscription for perhaps five or six seconds to work through its meaning, and now he was passing them in two or three seconds each, his reading accelerating as the passage continued. Either his fluency with the Vale-script was sharpening from continuous exposure — which was plausible, since any trained linguist will show rapid acceleration in an immersion environment — or the script itself was becoming more legible to him because the dreamer was easing the passage-experience for a reader who had properly addressed the dreamer. She suspected the latter, though she could not prove it. She filed the observation.
But the more significant change in Aldric — and she noted this with the small interior sharpening that marked a genuinely consequential observation — was in his posture. Aldric was standing taller. This was a man who, in all the days she had known him, had carried the habitual slight stoop of a scholar who had spent too many years bent over manuscripts and whose spine had never quite forgiven the choice. She had, without remarking upon it, estimated his height at perhaps six feet one or two, under the stoop. Now, walking the second passage with his head lifted to read the inscriptions, his spine was aligning itself in a way she had never seen on him before. He was, she estimated, at least an inch and a half taller than he had been an hour ago. The scholar’s stoop was dissolving. He walked upright. His neck, which had always inclined slightly forward in the habitual reading-posture, was carrying his head in a more balanced position. He looked, she realized with a small private jolt, considerably younger than she had assessed him to be. She had placed his age at perhaps fifty-five to sixty. Walking upright in the passage, he looked forty-eight.
The dreamer was restoring him. Or, more precisely, the passage’s medium was restoring him — was perhaps restoring him to the scholar he had been before the years of stooped reading had curved him. This was the first medical intervention she had seen from the Witness, and she noted it as such. The Witness, she understood, was capable of subtle restoration in its environs. The Witness had chosen, for Aldric specifically, to align his spine. This was not accidental. The dreamer had assessed Aldric, had seen that Aldric was performing the reading-work for which the dreamer most required his service, and had adjusted Aldric’s physical posture to better support the reading. It was a very small gift, but it was precisely calibrated, and it told her a great deal about what kind of dreamer they were walking toward. A dreamer who adjusts the spine of a useful reader is a dreamer who attends to details, values the usefulness of its visitors, and has the means to express gratitude through subtle physical interventions. She filed this too.
Balthazar walked third in her observation. He was muttering, still, the continuous muttering that was his default, but she noticed that the content of the muttering had shifted. She had, over the course of the journey, developed an ear for Balthazar’s different mutter-registers — the grumbling mutter, the analytical mutter, the muttered commentary on other parties’ procedural choices, the rarer mutter of genuine alarm. The current mutter was none of these. She listened, carefully, to pick up the thread of it. It was, she realized after perhaps thirty seconds of attention, a mutter about cathedral architecture. He was muttering the names of architectural features in what sounded like a pedagogical sequence — “transept, nave, ambulatory, apse, triforium, clerestory” — the way a man recites a list he was required to memorize as a child and has been reciting under his breath ever since, without conscious awareness that the recitation is running. He was, she understood at once, experiencing the passage as a cathedral. His previous life in the cathedral kitchen where Sister Clemence had fed the novices — the life he had named at the fire the night before last — was returning to him through the medium of the descent, and the returning was expressing itself in the muttered architectural vocabulary.
More significantly: Balthazar’s gait had changed. He had, in all the days she had known him, walked with the short efficient stride of a short-statured man who had spent his life crossing ship’s decks, which are crowded and require economy of motion. Now, in the passage, his stride had lengthened. His feet were covering more ground per step than they had been at the ice-shield. He was walking, she realized with slight astonishment, at the full processional pace of a man walking down the center aisle of a cathedral nave. The pace was stately. It was not self-conscious. He was not performing it. His body had simply adopted the pace because his body remembered that this kind of interior was a cathedral and cathedrals are walked at the processional pace. He was not aware he had done it. She knew he was not aware because his muttering had not commented on it; Balthazar comments on everything he is aware of. The pace-change had happened beneath his awareness.
And most consequentially — and this was the change she had been most attentive to from the moment she first noticed it — his shoulders had straightened. Not settled, as Tobin’s had. Straightened. Balthazar had walked with rounded forward-curved shoulders for the entire period of her acquaintance with him, the shoulders of a man who had spent his life hunched against weather and suspicion. Now his shoulders were squared back. His chest was open. His neck was lengthened. The physical posture was the posture of a man who had once been a boy of the cloister, trained to stand with the novice-straightness of one who was learning to sing in the choir. She understood, looking at his back as he walked, that Balthazar had, as a young man, sung. She was certain of it. The posture was not the posture of a man who had merely been educated by the brothers; it was the posture of a man who had been specifically trained to stand and breathe for choral singing. This was a piece of Balthazar’s biography he had not shared and which, she suspected, he had not himself consciously remembered in decades. The descent was bringing it back to his body before it reached his mind. She would watch to see whether it reached his mind, and when.
Ysolde, ahead of Balthazar, walked fourth in Seraphine’s observation. Ysolde, she had seen, was struggling more with the descent than any of the others. The struggle was not alarm; it was a specific kind of sensory overload. Ysolde was, as Seraphine had come to understand, a woman whose primary sensory register was the living-system register — the small continuous cues by which a forest or a meadow communicates its condition to the attentive scout. That register, which had served her so well in the enchanted wood and then in the grasslands, was entirely absent from the Vale’s underground passage. There was no birdsong here. No insect-chirr. No leaf-movement. No distant animal sound. The medium was not a living ecosystem; it was a constructed interior, the architecture of a civilization without any accompanying biology. Ysolde’s ear, trained to pick up the rustle of a vole twelve feet off the path, was receiving only the sound of five sets of boots on pale stone and the distant faint hum of something very large and very slow that she had noticed within the first minutes of the descent and that she had, by the tilt of her head, been tracking ever since.
Ysolde was compensating. Seraphine watched her compensate with a professional’s appreciation for skilled improvisation. Ysolde had begun, within perhaps the first hundred paces, to hum under her breath. Not a scout’s melody for reconnaissance, but a simpler wordless hum, pitched in a low register, barely audible. Seraphine recognized the hum, after a few minutes of listening, as a humming version of the open-country song Ysolde had sung at the evening camp after leaving the enchanted wood — the piper-and-miller’s-daughter song. Ysolde was humming it to herself because she needed audible living sound in the passage and the passage did not provide it and so she was providing it. The hum was stabilizing her. Seraphine could see the stabilization in the way Ysolde’s head was no longer darting side to side but had settled into the steady forward attention of a scout who had managed her sensory environment.
But underneath the stabilization, something else was happening to Ysolde. She was — and this was the observation that had given Seraphine the compassionate sharpening that now pulsed beneath her professional attention — Ysolde was, very subtly, reaching into her inner pouch at intervals to touch the braided circlet Pell had given her. Seraphine saw the gesture, the hand moving up to the breast-pouch, the fingers slipping into the pouch for a fraction of a second, the hand returning to its swinging rhythm at the hip. She counted the gestures. In the first fifteen minutes of the descent, Ysolde had touched the circlet seven times. The frequency was increasing. Ysolde was, without being aware of it, reaching for the circlet for reassurance — for the confirmation that the greenwood’s attention was still with her in this dead interior — and each touch was providing a measure of reassurance, because Ysolde’s shoulders dropped a fraction after each touch, and the hum continued unbroken.
Seraphine understood, watching this, that Ysolde’s circlet was warming again. It was warming because the wood had followed her into the descent, or because the dreamer was allowing the wood’s attention to reach through the passage to Ysolde, or because the circlet was simply a mnemonic that Ysolde’s own interior warmth had been animating through contact. Any of these explanations would do; Seraphine did not need to choose among them. What mattered was that the circlet was doing its work, and that Ysolde was walking the passage with the small steady support of something she loved still being in contact with her, and that the support was sufficient.
And this brought Seraphine, finally, to her own position in the column and her own interior register, which she had been postponing the assessment of because she had been working outward from the baselines first. She permitted herself, having completed the others, the few minutes’ examination of her own state that professional thoroughness required.
She was walking more lightly than usual. She had noticed, in the first fifty paces, that her tread was quieter than she had intended it to be. She had, at the ice-shield’s entry, set herself to walk with the ordinary composed step she used on strange terrain, which was a step that produced a small measured contact between the boot and the ground, sufficient to detect any hollowness or giving-way in the floor beneath her. Her actual step, walking the second passage, was lighter than that. Her boots were making almost no sound on the pale stone. She was walking, she realized on close self-examination, with the silent-tread gait of a woman in a room where she did not wish to be overheard. This was an unconscious adaptation. She had not set out to walk silently. Her body had chosen silence because the passage felt, to her body, like a room in which silence was appropriate.
More revealingly: her hands. She had, for the whole of her adult professional life, walked any unfamiliar interior with her hands lightly at her sides, elbows slightly bent, in the position that permitted the fastest access to concealed weaponry. She had checked the position perhaps five thousand times in her life. It was her baseline. Now, in the second passage of the Vale’s underground, her hands were not at her sides. They were clasped lightly at her waist, one above the other, in the posture of a woman entering a chapel. She had adopted the posture without conscious choice. She noticed it only when she specifically turned her attention to her hands and found them not where they usually were. She considered whether to correct them — whether to drop them to her sides and restore her professional default — and she decided, after a moment’s consideration, not to. The clasped position was appropriate. The clasped position was respectful. If she corrected it, she would be forcing a professional pose that the medium did not warrant, and the dreamer — who she assumed was attentive to such gestures — would read the correction as a subtle refusal of the welcome. She left her hands clasped. She was the third person of the party whose body had altered itself to the passage’s medium before her mind had fully caught up. Tobin had settled. Aldric had straightened. Balthazar had squared and lengthened his stride. Ysolde had begun to hum. And she, Seraphine, had clasped her hands and silenced her tread.
Each of the five was being shaped by the descent. Each shape was specific. Each shape was, she judged after a further minute’s reflection, restorative rather than diminishing — each of them was being returned, to some degree and in some specific register, to a self they had been before some accumulation of damage had curved them. Tobin was being returned to the ease of a man who had once been at home in such places. Aldric was being returned to the upright scholar he had been in his youth. Balthazar was being returned to the novice who had once sung in a cathedral kitchen. Ysolde was being returned — or rather, was being sustained, by the wood’s reaching — to the scout whose living-sensory register was the ground of her being. And she, Seraphine, was being returned to — to what, precisely? She considered. She considered with the care that the question deserved, which was substantial care, because returning to a self required first identifying which self one had been, and Seraphine had not been one self in her life. She had been the small composed girl of Valmont before the court; she had been the sharp-eyed page of the court in her early teens; she had been the apprenticed operative of fourteen through twenty-one; she had been the active professional of twenty-two through thirty-three; she had been the independent contractor of thirty-four through — well, through her current age, which she did not announce. Five distinct selves, discretely sequenced, each superseding the previous.
The posture of clasped hands and silenced tread did not correspond neatly to any of these. It corresponded, she realized with a small interior start, to a self earlier than any of them. It corresponded to the self of perhaps six or seven, before Valmont — the very small girl who had been taught, by a grandmother she had not seen since she was nine and whose name she had not permitted herself to pronounce in thirty years, to walk through her grandmother’s small chapel on the way to her grandmother’s kitchen with her hands clasped and her feet silent, so as not to disturb the saints in their niches. That girl. That self. The one before the sequence began. The one the sequence had been built upon, and had largely buried, and had never entirely eradicated.
The dreamer was returning her, it seemed, to her grandmother’s chapel.
She permitted herself, for perhaps fifteen seconds of walking, the full felt sensation of being that small girl again. The sensation was not sentimental. It was not nostalgic. It was, rather, the sensation of standing in a space that had been designed to remind one of the reverence appropriate to a space, and of finding that one’s body, at the deepest level, remembered how to be reverent without effort. The small girl had known how to walk through a sacred space. The operative had forgotten. The passage was reminding her.
She did not permit the sensation to last beyond fifteen seconds. She was on professional duty. She had four companions to observe and the rear of the column to cover. She returned her attention, with the small practiced motion of resetting her interior focus, to the observational work. But she did not correct her hands or her tread. She walked as the dreamer had arranged for her to walk. She accepted the arrangement.
They continued descending. The second passage opened, at its end, into the second crossroads-chamber, which was perhaps twice the size of the first. Tobin paused at the center of it, consulted the inscriptions on the walls, gestured to a southern exit, and the party continued. She noted, without comment, that Tobin’s direction-finding did not appear to require him to read the inscriptions; his hand had moved toward the southern exit before his eyes had finished scanning the wall. He knew the way. He had walked these halls before, presumably, or the party’s other version of itself in whatever previous iteration had, or he had been given the map by Pell in some conversation at the grove she had not witnessed. Any of these was possible. She filed it.
The third passage descended more steeply than the second, and its inscriptions were more densely carved, and Aldric paused twice in the first forty paces to consult his cowl for the clear reading of a particular glyph that had caught his attention. Seraphine drew up behind him during the second of these pauses, because the column’s spacing had compressed around him, and she overheard his murmured translation to Tobin:
“This one reads, I think, something like: ‘Here the first confluence of the named. Below this point, the named begin to pool.’ It is a waymark indicating that we are entering the zone of the lattice proper — the zone where the named contributors begin to be integrated, as opposed to the outer passages where each named contributor maintains their discrete identity.”
“Aye,” said Tobin. “We are close to the first listening-hall. Expect, in the next few paces, to hear things.”
“To hear things?” said Ysolde, turning her head back from her lead position with the sharp attention of a scout whose ears had just been informed they should expect input.
“Voices,” said Tobin, mildly. “Not loud. Not threatening. Fragments. The named contributors, in this zone, can sometimes be heard speaking small fragments of their original lives — a phrase, a name, a line of a song. The fragments are the residue of their individual consciousnesses within the pooled integration. They are not directed at us. They are ambient. It is like walking through a library in which some of the books are, very faintly, reading themselves aloud. Do not be alarmed. The fragments do not constitute a threat. They are, in fact, the most human thing you will encounter in the descent.”
Ysolde nodded. She turned her head forward and resumed her lead. But Seraphine noticed that her hand went back to the pouch and touched the circlet, and held it there perhaps a full second, before returning to her side.
They walked perhaps another thirty paces before the first fragment came.
It came, as Tobin had described, faintly — so faintly that Seraphine almost missed it, or doubted she had heard it. A voice, a woman’s voice, at what seemed to be a middle distance ahead and slightly to the left of their path, speaking a single phrase in a language Seraphine did not recognize. The voice was warm. The voice had the particular grain of a mother’s voice used to call a child to supper. The phrase was, as best she could tell, three syllables. It was spoken, heard, and gone, within perhaps a full second and a half.
Ysolde, at the head of the column, paused. Her hum stopped. She turned her head very slightly toward the left, the way a dog turns its ear toward a sound. After perhaps two seconds, she resumed walking and resumed humming. She did not ask what she had heard. She did not need to. She had heard what Tobin had described. She was confirming, to herself and to the party, that the phenomenon matched the description, and that she was functioning.
The second fragment came perhaps twenty paces later. This one was closer — perhaps just behind Aldric’s left shoulder. It was a man’s voice this time, younger, and it spoke what sounded like a line of a poem in the same language Seraphine did not recognize. Aldric turned his head. He lifted his cowl slightly. He whispered, “I nearly caught that. The second word was the word for ‘memory’ in the Vale-script. I am nearly certain of it. The line was some kind of verse.”
“Aye,” said Tobin. “You will catch more as we descend. The fragments will begin to cluster.”
The third fragment came at twenty more paces. It was a child laughing. The laughter lasted perhaps two full seconds and was clearly a child’s laugh of no particular age — four years old, or six — and Seraphine felt, at hearing it, the small professional tightening in her throat that she had learned to suppress in nine previous contexts of her career and that she did not entirely suppress here. A child’s laugh in a dead city is a sound whose unexpected arrival will, if the listener is honest, produce a response in the chest regardless of the listener’s training. She did not attempt to hide the response. She permitted it. It was appropriate to the context.
Balthazar, at this fragment, stopped muttering. The architectural vocabulary recitation that had been his continuous undertone for the whole of the descent ceased entirely for perhaps ten seconds, and then resumed at a slightly slower pace. He had, Seraphine understood, been particularly moved by the child’s laugh, because Balthazar had been raised among children in the cathedral kitchen and the sound of a child’s laugh within these walls had reached him at a register he had not prepared for.
Ysolde said, without turning her head, “Tobin. Are the children’s voices — ”
“Aye, lass. They are the children’s contributions. Children could contribute to the lattice as well as adults. The civilization considered it a form of education; children between the ages of five and nine were sometimes brought to contribute a small portion of their attention to the Witness as part of their initiation into civic life. The contributions from children were small, as you would expect, and the fragments you hear from them are the residue of their small contributions. They are not the ghosts of children in the sense that the children died here — the children went home from their contribution-sessions and lived their lives. The fragments are the echoes of their attention at the moment they contributed.”
“Oh,” said Ysolde, softly.
“I know, lass.”
They walked on. The fragments came more frequently now, as Tobin had said they would. Some of them clustered in what sounded like small conversations — two voices answering each other, the echoes of a dialogue that had occurred at some moment of the civilization’s history and had been preserved as a reverberation in the lattice’s ambient field. Others came solo: a single laugh, a single name called, a single snatch of a song sung in a kitchen, a single exclamation of surprise. Seraphine began, after perhaps a hundred paces of this, to understand the quality of the underground in a way she had not grasped before. The city was not empty. The city was full. Full of voices. Full of fragments. Full of the preserved small attentions of three hundred thousand contributing minds across sixteen centuries. The city was the most populated city she had ever walked through, in a certain sense, and every one of its inhabitants was speaking, very faintly, without any of them speaking to her directly. It was the most crowded silence she had ever encountered.
She felt — and she permitted the feeling, because the feeling was appropriate — a kind of tenderness she had not expected to feel here. It was the tenderness one feels at an unexpected gathering of strangers who have, without knowing one another, left fragments of themselves behind in a common place, and whose fragments are now mingling in a way none of them had intended during their lives but that formed, in aggregate, something very like a chorus.
She walked on. Her hands remained clasped. Her tread remained silent. She watched her four companions continue to transform in the descent.
At perhaps the one-hour mark of the descent, she observed the most specific change of the day in one of them, and it was the change that she had been anticipating since Balthazar’s posture had altered, and it arrived as she had anticipated.
They had passed through a third crossroads-chamber, and were now descending the fourth passage, which was narrower and steeper than the previous passages, and which led, Tobin had said, to the third level of the underground city. The inscriptions on this passage’s walls were denser and more ornate, in the style of the civilization’s middle period. The fragment-voices were more frequent here, arriving at perhaps two or three per minute of walking.
Into this air, walking third in the column just ahead of Tobin and just behind Aldric, Balthazar began, almost inaudibly, to sing.
It was not singing in the full sense. It was a humming, as Ysolde had been humming, but at a lower register and with a more specific musical shape. He was humming a particular melody. Seraphine listened. She listened for perhaps thirty seconds, and she was able to identify the melody because her own early education at Valmont had included a period of liturgical instruction from a senior brother of an order whose chants were well-known across the continent. Balthazar was humming a chant. Specifically, he was humming what she recognized as the simple Kyrie of a common rural tradition, a chant that would have been taught to young novices as part of their first choral training. He was humming it in the low, easy register of a man who had sung it hundreds of times and had not forgotten the shape of it.
She felt, at recognizing the chant, a lift in her chest that surprised her. Balthazar was returning, not just posturally but audibly, to the boy of the cathedral kitchen. He was returning in a specific way — he was offering, through his humming, a liturgical response to the cathedral-quality of the passage they walked through, which was the natural response of a man of his early training. He was not aware of it. His muttering had stopped. The humming had replaced it. And she, Seraphine, who had in her life heard perhaps four truly moving liturgical performances in various churches and chapels she had by professional necessity entered for reasons of her work, found herself listening to Balthazar’s very ordinary untrained humming of a simple rural Kyrie with a kind of attention she had not given to any of the four professional performances. Because this one was not a performance. This one was a man’s body, without his permission, making the sound that his body remembered being at home in. This one was real.
Tobin, behind Balthazar, had noticed as well. Seraphine saw Tobin’s head incline slightly, and the small corner-of-the-mouth movement that in Tobin’s face-language indicated a deep quiet pleasure. Tobin and she exchanged, across the line of the column, the briefest glance, and the glance confirmed that both of them had heard, both had understood, and both would not remark upon it to Balthazar, because Balthazar was doing a thing he needed to do and that he would be embarrassed about if called out on.
Ysolde, at the head, did not turn, but Seraphine saw her step settle into a slightly different pace — a pace synchronized, she realized, to the tempo of Balthazar’s Kyrie. Ysolde’s hum changed key to match Balthazar’s. Without words or eye contact, Ysolde was accompanying him. She was supporting his chant with the low drone that his tradition’s music had always required. Seraphine did not know whether Ysolde was aware of what she was doing. The dreamer was arranging all of them.
Aldric, the scholar, said nothing, but his pace slowed by a fraction, and Seraphine understood that he was listening — not to read the inscriptions, for the moment, but simply to hear the two of them, the way a scholar listens when a performance of a piece in his field arrives in his hearing at an unexpected hour.
She walked the rear of the column with her hands clasped at her waist and her tread silent and the Kyrie in her ears and the fragments of three hundred thousand contributors murmuring around her in the dead dim air of a city that had been waiting eight thousand years for a party of five souls to walk through it in this exact configuration, and she thought — she permitted herself the thought, and recorded it, and did not moderate it:
This is the most important walk of my life.
She did not know how she knew. She did not need to know. The knowing was the kind of knowing that arrived in her chest at certain rare moments and that she had learned, across her life, to trust. She was walking the most important walk of her life. The walk would continue for perhaps three more hours by Tobin’s estimation, and it would end at the ice-shield of the lattice-chamber, and the lattice-chamber would be the place where the party would meet the dreamer proper and the decision would be made. And she, Seraphine, would be fifth in the line, and her position at the rear was now revealed to her as precisely the position she had been intended to walk for the whole of her career — not because she was the threat-watcher, though she was, but because she was the one who could observe, in its totality, the transformation of the four souls walking ahead of her, and who could bear witness to that transformation in the register of a woman who had trained her whole life for observational work and had never been given work of this moment.
She permitted herself, at this understanding, a second small permission of the descent, which was the permission to feel the dread that pressed up against the compassion and the tenderness. She did not banish the dread. She did not soften it. She acknowledged it and let it have its own quiet presence beside the other emotions. The dread was real. The lattice-chamber would be a harder crossing than the first ice-shield. The conversation with the dreamer would be consequential in ways none of them could fully anticipate. Some members of the party might be changed by the conversation in ways that could not be reversed. She, in particular, as the professional with the most experience of high-consequence rooms, knew that high-consequence rooms always extracted a cost from their participants, and that the cost was never predictable in advance. She did not know what her cost would be. She suspected, without being able to name it, that her cost might be the most considerable of the party’s, because her particular interior architecture was the most defended, and the dreamer — she judged — did not permit defense, because the dreamer’s nature was pooled openness, and only an openness could speak to it.
She would be required to open. She would be required to lay down, at the lattice-chamber, the defenses she had carried since she was fourteen, and to speak to the dreamer as herself, without the masks, without the composure, without the trained gait or the trained hands or the trained tread. The small girl of six or seven who had walked her grandmother’s chapel with clasped hands and silent feet — that girl, and only that girl, would be permitted to speak to the dreamer, and Seraphine would have to find that girl within herself and allow her to come forward.
She did not know whether she could. She had not been that girl in thirty-five years. The girl had been useful for her grandmother’s chapel and had not been useful for Valmont, and Valmont had required her to put the girl aside, and she had put the girl aside, and the girl had been waiting, she now suspected, in the same interior room where other buried selves waited, for a summoning that she, Seraphine, had never issued and would have to issue now.
This, she understood, was her cost. This was what the lattice-chamber was going to require of her. To unbury the girl. To let the girl come forward. To speak to the dreamer as that girl, with that girl’s language, without Seraphine’s operational overlay.
She did not know whether she could. She walked the rear of the column with her hands still clasped and her tread still silent and her dread now settled behind her sternum like a small cold stone, and she permitted the dread to sit there, because the dread was honest and would give her the focus she needed.
Ahead of her, Balthazar continued to hum the Kyrie. Tobin walked his grandfatherly amble. Aldric read his glyphs at the new faster fluency. Ysolde led, her hum matching Balthazar’s. Fragments continued to arrive around them, voices and laughs and single words in an unknown tongue, the continuous whisper of three hundred thousand long-ago attentions.
They reached the fourth crossroads-chamber at about what Seraphine estimated to be the two-and-a-half-hour mark of the descent. Tobin paused, consulted the inscriptions by touch rather than reading, and pointed to the central exit, which was broader than the others and appeared, at the edge of the chamber’s pale light, to slope downward more gently.
“This passage,” Tobin said, “leads to the first listening-hall. The first listening-hall is not the lattice-chamber itself. It is the antechamber where the contributors’ voices are closer to audible. We should rest there for a short time before descending to the final level. The passage beyond the first listening-hall leads to the last ice-shield and then to the lattice-chamber.”
“How long to the listening-hall?” Aldric asked.
“A hundred paces. Less.”
“And then to the lattice-chamber from the listening-hall?”
“Another three hundred paces, through the fifth passage, with one more short descent at the end.”
Aldric nodded. Ysolde nodded. Balthazar, his humming trailing into silence at the sound of conversation, nodded also. Seraphine, at the rear, said, “A rest at the listening-hall is wise. We should take it properly. We should eat something. Perhaps drink a little of Pell’s tincture. The last passage will be harder, and we should be as strong as we can be for it.”
“Agreed,” said Tobin.
They walked the hundred paces. The passage was the shortest they had yet traversed, and it ended, abruptly, at a high-arched opening that gave onto a great domed chamber whose ceiling rose perhaps fifty feet above the pale-stone floor. Seraphine, stepping into the listening-hall behind the others, stopped for a moment at the threshold to take in the view.
The hall was roughly circular, perhaps eighty feet across at its widest. The dome was unbroken; the roof was the original eight-thousand-year-old construction, intact. The walls were covered, floor to ceiling, in inscriptions of the densest kind yet seen — the names, Aldric murmured softly as they entered, of the first ten thousand contributors, inscribed in the order they had joined the lattice. The floor was of pale stone, patterned in a concentric set of rings emanating from a central low platform — a platform of perhaps five feet in diameter, raised six inches above the floor, empty of any feature save its elevation.
And the voices. The voices in the listening-hall were not the sparse fragments of the passages. The voices in the listening-hall were continuous. Not loud — the hall, like the passages, kept its overall hush — but continuous, a soft layered chorus of murmured fragments arriving from every direction at once, the reverberation of ten thousand named contributors speaking their small fragments in gentle overlap, so that the total effect was of standing inside a great quiet conversation that had been ongoing for eight thousand years and would continue for as long as the lattice persisted.
Seraphine stood at the threshold and she listened. She listened for perhaps thirty seconds. She did not try to distinguish individual voices. She let the whole chorus wash over her. She felt, beneath the chorus, the very slow deep hum she had been aware of since entering the gate — the hum of the dreamer itself, beneath the fragments, the carrier-tone upon which the fragments rode. The hum was audible now, in this hall, more clearly than it had been in the passages. The hum was like the sound a great organ makes when the pedal-note is held for a very long time after the melody has ceased. It was the dreamer’s continuous attending, made audible by the acoustic properties of the hall.
The four of her companions had walked a few paces into the hall and stopped. Each of them was, she saw, doing what she was doing — simply standing, listening, permitting the listening-hall to do its work. Tobin had closed his eyes. Aldric had lifted his face toward the dome, his lips slightly parted in the scholar’s expression of astonishment. Balthazar had sunk to one knee in a gesture that, on any other man, would have been theatrical, but on Balthazar was simply the response of a body that had once knelt for prayer and was doing so now because the room asked for it. Ysolde had turned slowly in place, taking in the full circumference of the inscribed walls, and her expression was the open-hearted wonder of a scout entering a new ecosystem whose species she had never catalogued.
Seraphine walked slowly forward into the hall. Her hands were still clasped. Her tread was still silent. She crossed to the central platform. She did not step onto it. She did not need to. She stood at its edge, and she listened to the chorus, and she felt, in her chest, the small stone of dread that she had been carrying for an hour begin to crack slightly — not dissolve, because the dread remained, but crack, as though the weight of the stone were being shared between her and the hall, and the hall were taking on a portion of the carrying.
She stood. The others stood. The chorus continued. The hum continued beneath it.
After perhaps three minutes — she did not time herself; she simply noticed when the moment had completed — Tobin said, softly, as if speaking to a large audience in a place where loud speaking would have been inappropriate:
“Friends. This is the first listening-hall. We are welcome here. We should rest, eat, drink, speak softly among ourselves. And then we descend the final passage.”
Ysolde walked slowly to Seraphine’s side and stood beside her at the platform’s edge. Aldric came and joined them. Balthazar rose from his knee and came. Tobin walked the perimeter of the ring-patterns and returned to the center.
They sat down, the five of them, in a loose circle at the edge of the central platform, and they ate from Tobin’s pack the small meal he had prepared for this rest — dry biscuits with a spread of soft cheese, a small portion of dried fruit, and a sip each of Pell’s tincture. They spoke softly. They did not speak of the descent, or of the lattice-chamber, or of the decision. They spoke, by some unspoken agreement, of smaller things — Ysolde described the song she was humming and named the village it had come from; Aldric described the book he had been reading in his childhood when he had first encountered the word “lattice” in its architectural sense; Balthazar described Sister Clemence’s method of kneading bread with only one hand, because she had, he now remembered, lost part of her other hand in a kitchen accident decades before he had come to the cathedral, and had worked around the loss with a skill that had been the first piece of practical wisdom Balthazar had ever admired in another human being; Tobin described, very briefly, the other two listening-halls he had stood in on his previous two descents, and said that this one was the largest and most well-preserved, and that the quality of its chorus was the most moving he had yet experienced.
Seraphine, when it was her turn, said, “I was taught, as a very small child, to walk through a chapel with my hands clasped. I did not remember the teaching until I entered this passage this morning, and found my hands clasped without my having placed them there. I am grateful to the teacher. Her name was Amelie. She was my grandmother. I have not spoken her name aloud in thirty-five years.”
She said this without expecting to. The saying surprised her. She permitted the surprise. She did not soften what she had said. The others received it in the quiet that was the correct response. Ysolde, after a moment, reached over and laid her hand on Seraphine’s forearm for perhaps three seconds, and then withdrew it. Tobin nodded once. Aldric said, softly, “Amelie. Thank you for telling us.”
“Amelie,” Balthazar murmured, as though committing the name to his own memory. “A fine name. A good name.”
They finished the meal. They rose. They stood for a moment more in the center of the listening-hall, the chorus murmuring around them, the hum beneath. Tobin said:
“Now we descend to the lattice-chamber. The last passage. The second ice-shield. And the dreamer.”
“Yes,” said Seraphine.
They walked to the exit at the far side of the hall. It was a low arched opening, and the passage beyond sloped more steeply than any passage they had yet walked. Ysolde paused at its threshold and turned back to look at the listening-hall one last time, and Seraphine saw her face gather, briefly, into the expression of a woman bidding farewell to a room she loved.
Ysolde turned forward again. She entered the passage.
The others followed, in their order. Seraphine, at the rear, paused a moment at the threshold, turned her head slightly to the side, and permitted her eyes to close for perhaps two seconds. In those two seconds, she felt — for the first time so clearly that she could name it — the specific attention of the dreamer settled upon her own interior chamber, and she felt the dreamer acknowledge her grandmother’s name, and she felt, in return, a very small warm grace, as though the dreamer were saying to her, not in words: “Amelie. We have her now. She is among the named. Thank you for the speaking of her name.”
Seraphine opened her eyes. She stepped into the passage. She walked down the steep slope behind Balthazar.
The chorus of the listening-hall faded behind her, but did not entirely cease; she could still, faintly, hear its undertone in the walls of the passage. The hum beneath the chorus intensified. They were descending toward the lattice-chamber. The dreamer was becoming more present.
Her hands remained clasped. Her tread remained silent. The small cold stone of dread was still in her chest, but it had, since the meal in the listening-hall, acquired an unexpected companion, which was a small warm ember of courage. The ember had been given to her, she suspected, by Ysolde’s hand on her forearm, or by Tobin’s single nod, or by Balthazar’s quiet repetition of her grandmother’s name, or by Aldric’s scholar’s thanks, or by the dreamer’s small grace at the threshold, or by all of these together. She did not attempt to disentangle the sources. She accepted the ember as a composite gift.
She walked on. The final passage descended. The lattice-chamber waited. And she, Seraphine de Valmont-Lissaria, the Thrice-Masked, prepared, with the small composed preparation that was the only preparation she had ever been taught to make for any consequential room, to lay down her masks.
The descent continued. Ahead, in the pale dim air, a new shimmer was beginning to become faintly visible at the far end of the passage — the second ice-shield, denser than the first, at whose threshold the party would speak the deeper consent, and beyond which the dreamer waited in its full register.
She walked. She observed. Her companions, each in their own transformation, walked ahead of her. The listening-hall’s chorus continued its muted carrier. The hum beneath intensified.
She was ready, she thought, as ready as a woman like her could be, which was not fully ready, but adequate to the task. She drew one long breath, and she released it. The ember in her chest warmed very slightly. The stone of dread remained, but was bearable. She continued downward.
Segment 18: Of the Puzzle of the Seven Mirrors
Now herken, gentils, for the passage’s slope Did bring us, after perhaps the final stope Of winding steeper walk, unto a door Wherein we had not been before. Before The second ice-shield lay, which Tobin had foretold, There stood across our way a gate of old Carved granite, peaked, its lintel wrought in signs Of the seven schools of magic. Long straight lines Of glyph-work I could read with careful eye Named Conjuration, Evocation, sly Abjuration, proud Transmutation, keen Divination, subtle Enchantment, sheen- Bright Illusion — all seven were inscribed Above the lintel in an order proscribed By the ancient civilization’s customary Sequence. The door itself was ordinary Enough, a broad pale panel of the same Grown-granite as the walls, without a frame Or handle. No keyhole. No visible latch. A door, apparently, one had to match With some particular key of understanding Before it would consent to be expanding.
Tobin paused. The party stopped behind him. Tobin Examined the door, put his palm flat upon it, listened within For a long minute with his ear pressed against the stone, And then stepped back. He turned to us. He said, alone Of us, seeing us fully in the small filtered light:
“Friends. We have reached the puzzle-chamber. The site Where the first test was laid for any who approached the lattice By the builders of the original binding. This is not malice. This is a proving. The builders arranged a sequence of puzzles Throughout the approach to the lattice-chamber — small guzzles Of challenge, as the old tongue called them — such that any Party reaching the lattice would have demonstrated, by the many Small solutions, sufficient magical literacy to be trusted With what the lattice-chamber held. The puzzles are not adjusted For the individual party; they are fixed, as the builders set them. I have seen the first puzzle twice before. Neither time did we let them Stump us for long, though the first time took us half a day. The trick Of this one is that it requires coordination — one person’s wit is no pick For it. All five of us shall need to contribute. Aldric, Brother, You will lead the solving, because you have the schools. Mother Ysolde, Balthazar, Seraphine, and I will follow your instructions. Agreed?”
We all agreed. We had discussed, on our descent’s instructions, The likelihood of such puzzles, and Tobin had mentioned in passing That the builders had placed tests along the approach to the lattice, passing Over the specifics, which he did not then recall in full. Now that The first test was before us, the specifics came back to him in a flat- Spoken instruction, and I, being the most scholarly of the party In matters of the seven schools, accepted the leadership with a hearty Mixture of trepidation and readiness. My particular scholarly expertise, I must note, was not the schools of magic as actively practiced by mages; My expertise was ecclesiastical paleography and the history of magical Texts. But a scholar who has spent forty years reading historical magical Documents has, by necessary osmosis, absorbed a good working knowledge Of the seven schools’ theoretical foundations, and I had, during my college Years, taken the full standard sequence of courses on each school as part Of my generalist scholar’s formation. I was not a magister of any school. I was, however, a competent reader of the schools’ own self-descriptions, and thou- Ghts of their historical applications, and I judged that this would be sufficient For reading a puzzle designed to test magical literacy of the deficient Kind a field-party of questers would be expected to bring. The puzzle, after all, Was set by builders who expected visitors to be practicing mages. I would have to call On such practitioners’ knowledge as I had gathered by osmosis; but I would have it.
Tobin placed his hand upon the door at a particular point, touched it with reverence, And murmured under his breath a short phrase in the Vale-script, which I later learned was The simple polite request for admission that any educated visitor was expected to use. The door, in response, did not open. Instead, a faint light began to glow along the groove- Cut outlines of the seven school-glyphs above the lintel, and then, by degrees, The door itself dissolved — not opened; dissolved — into a pale mist that hung in the breeze Of the passage for perhaps three breaths and then cleared, revealing the chamber beyond.
We stepped through the threshold. The threshold was cool but not ice-shield cool. And beyond The chamber was a small circular room, perhaps twenty paces across, with a domed ceiling Of pale stone set with hundreds of small crystalline fragments that gave off a soft steady Filtered light. The floor was of the same pale stone as the passage, polished to a satin shine. And arranged around the walls of the room, at seven regular points equidistant along a line That circled the chamber, stood seven tall mirrors.
Seven mirrors. Each was a standing oval perhaps six feet tall and three feet wide, set in a frame Of pale stone that merged into the wall behind it. Each was empty of reflection — that is, the same Ordinary reflecting surface did not show our images as we entered. Instead, each mirror showed A different landscape. I will describe them, because the description matters. I walked slowly Around the perimeter of the chamber, observing each mirror in turn, and the party followed me.
The first mirror, directly opposite the door we had entered through, showed a ship at sea under A storm-tossed sky, the waves heaving, the sail full with a wild wind, the crew visible but faraway, The scene frozen in the moment of a crest. The second mirror, to the right of the first, showed A man standing in a field with his arms raised, and from his hands a great cone of fire extending Forward into a grove of trees that were in the process of being set ablaze; the scene, again, frozen At the instant of contact between fire and wood. The third mirror showed a great stone wall That appeared to be in the process of forming itself out of nothing — blocks rising from the ground And arranging themselves into a battlement, the scene captured mid-assembly. The fourth mirror Showed a woman kneeling beside a pool of water with her face very close to the surface, her eyes Reflected back at her from the water in an uncanny stillness. The fifth mirror showed a great Crowd of people dancing in a circle under moonlight, their hands joined, all of them smiling with an Expression that seemed, even in the frozen image, to be unnatural in its uniformity. The sixth Mirror showed a man in robes standing on a hilltop with a staff raised, and from the staff a long column Of lightning descended into a distant valley where a small fortress crumbled. The seventh mirror, To the left of the door, showed a figure standing in what appeared to be empty air, suspended Above the landscape beneath them, without wings, without visible support, the landscape itself A rocky desert that stretched to the horizon.
Seven mirrors. Seven scenes. Seven schools of magic, each obviously intended to represent its Characteristic application. I studied them. The others waited.
“Aldric,” said Tobin, “take your time.”
I took my time. I walked slowly around the circle a second time, and then a third. I paused Before each mirror. I studied each scene with the full attention I would have given to a manuscript Illumination I had never seen before. I began to formulate, in my scholar’s mind, the matching Of scene to school. And it was here, reader, that I encountered the first substantive difficulty.
The matching was not straightforward. Each of the seven schools has characteristic applications, And at first glance each of the seven scenes represented one such application. But as I looked more Carefully, I realized that the builders had been subtler than the first glance permitted. Several of The scenes were ambiguous between two schools, and the matching required a finer understanding Of which school was definitionally responsible for which phenomenon, rather than the popular or Loose attribution. Let me walk through my reasoning, because the walking through is the whole Of the segment.
The first mirror, the ship in the storm, looked at first like an Evocation — the storm being the kind Of elemental phenomenon Evocation produces. But I considered further. The ship was not summoning The storm; the storm was weather, and the ship was surviving it. The scene’s magical content, If any, lay not in the storm but in the ship’s survival. And survival in a storm was, by the classical Definition, the application of Abjuration, which was the school of protection, defense, and the Warding of one’s person or vessel against hostile forces. The ship, I suspected, was a ship Protected by Abjuration magic, and the scene’s intent was to represent Abjuration.
The second mirror, the man with the cone of fire, was the most obviously literal of the seven. Fire Projected forward from the hands into a grove was the quintessential application of Evocation — The school of elemental creation, of force, of the direct manifestation of energy. This one I Judged to be unambiguous.
The third mirror, the stone wall assembling itself, was more subtle. At first it looked like Transmutation — the changing of one form of matter into another. But it was not transmutation. The blocks were already stone; they were not becoming stone. The magic was in the moving and Arranging of them. That was Conjuration — the school of calling, moving, and arranging physical Matter, particularly matter that was summoned or relocated. Conjuration could build walls by Calling stones to it. The scene was Conjuration.
The fourth mirror, the woman and the reflecting pool, was the easiest. A pool used as a scrying Medium, with the eyes in the reflection looking back unnaturally, was Divination — the school Of seeing, knowing, perceiving at a distance, and consulting unseen knowledge. The pool was A scrying tool. The scene was Divination.
The fifth mirror, the crowd of uniformly smiling dancers, was Enchantment — the school of Influence, compulsion, and the alteration of minds and wills. The uniformity of the smiles told The story: the dancers were not genuinely happy; they were magically caused to smile. The crowd Was enchanted into its dance.
So far, so good. I had three left to assign. The sixth mirror, the lightning-staff man on the Hilltop, and the seventh mirror, the figure suspended in air, and the first mirror, the ship in The storm. I had tentatively assigned the first to Abjuration. Let me consider the sixth and Seventh.
The sixth mirror, the lightning descending onto a fortress, was the more ambiguous of the two. Lightning was an Evocation phenomenon — but I had already assigned Evocation to the second Mirror with the cone of fire. Could two mirrors represent the same school? I did not think so. The builders would have been precise. One school, one mirror. So the lightning-mirror was not Evocation. What else could it be? I considered. The staff — a staff raised, calling the lightning From some distance — was a classical representation of long-range divine invocation, but Divination had already been assigned. Could it be Transmutation? Transmutation was the Changing of one form into another. Lightning did not obviously fit. But, I considered — the Fortress was crumbling. The fortress was being transmuted from fortress into rubble. The Lightning was the means, but the magical content of the scene was the transformation of the Fortress’s matter-state from intact to collapsed. That was Transmutation. The scene represented Transmutation by way of destructive transformation, with lightning as the visible agent.
That left the seventh mirror — the figure in the air — and Illusion remained as the unassigned School. A figure suspended in empty air without wings or visible support was, at first glance, An application of some kind of flight magic, which might be classified under several schools. But if I had assigned all other schools, Illusion must be the seventh mirror’s school, and the Figure’s suspension must therefore be — ah, I understood — must be an illusion. The figure was Not actually in the air. The figure appeared to be in the air, but was in fact supported by some Ordinary means not visible in the image, and the floating appearance was the illusion.
That would complete the sequence: Ship in storm = Abjuration. Man with fire = Evocation. Stone wall assembling = Conjuration. Woman and pool = Divination. Dancing crowd = Enchantment. Lightning-staff man = Transmutation. Figure in air = Illusion.
Having arrived at this matching, I turned to the party. “I think I have the first step. Each mirror Represents one of the seven schools, in the following assignment.” I named them, walking around The circle and pointing at each in turn.
Tobin nodded. “Aye. That matches my memory from the previous two times I saw this puzzle. But Matching is only the first step. The next step will be more subtle.”
“What is the next step?”
“The next step, Brother, is to activate the mirrors in a particular order, and each mirror requires A particular interaction. The order is the order of the schools as inscribed above the lintel Outside. The interaction depends on the school. And here is where all five of us come in, because Some of the interactions require more than one person.”
I turned and looked at the door-frame from inside. Above the lintel, on the interior side, the Same seven school-glyphs I had seen on the outside were inscribed, in their standard order: Conjuration, Evocation, Abjuration, Transmutation, Divination, Enchantment, Illusion. This was The canonical teaching sequence of the schools in the Vale’s magical academy, and the sequence Was preserved in my own scholar’s formation. I had learned the schools in exactly this order When I was fourteen. The sequence had a pedagogical logic — Conjuration first, because it was The simplest manipulation of existing matter; Evocation second, because it introduced the creation Of energy from magic; Abjuration third, because it was the inverse of Evocation, protecting against What Evocation produced; Transmutation fourth, because it combined Conjuration and Evocation To transform; Divination fifth, because it introduced the knowing of unseen things; Enchantment Sixth, because it applied magic to minds; Illusion seventh, because it applied magic to perception, The subtlest of the seven.
“Conjuration first, then,” I said.
“Conjuration first,” Tobin confirmed. “The stone-wall mirror. The interaction for Conjuration is That someone must place a hand on the mirror’s surface and mentally envision a small object Coming into being at the image’s foreground. The object must be something the one placing the Hand is actually holding elsewhere in the chamber or on their person. The mirror will confirm The envisioning by showing the object appearing in the scene.”
“Small object,” said Ysolde. “Like what?”
“Anything. A coin. A pebble. A piece of bread.”
Ysolde rummaged in her pocket and produced a small copper coin, one of her Haverfold coins. She walked to the Conjuration mirror. She placed her palm flat against the cool glassy surface. She closed her eyes. She focused on the coin in her other hand, and evidently on the mental image Of it appearing in the foreground of the stone-wall scene. After perhaps five seconds, the image In the mirror shifted — not dramatically, but definitely — and at the foreground of the scene, a Tiny copper coin appeared resting on a small patch of ground. The mirror emitted a soft chime — A single clear note — and the image of the copper coin dissolved a moment later, as did the rest Of the stone-wall scene, leaving the mirror’s surface a smooth pale white glow. One mirror was Completed.
“Evocation second,” said Tobin. “The fire-mirror. The interaction for Evocation is that someone Must place a hand on the mirror’s surface and speak a single word in any language that connotes Heat, force, or elemental power. The word must be spoken with intention.”
Balthazar, to my mild surprise, volunteered. He walked to the Evocation mirror. He placed his Palm on the surface. He said, in his ordinary harbor voice but with audible intention:
“Storm.”
The mirror rippled. The fire in the image flared briefly brighter, as though acknowledging the Word. The chime sounded — a different note this time, slightly higher. The scene dissolved. Two Mirrors complete.
“Abjuration third,” said Tobin. “The ship-mirror. The interaction for Abjuration is that someone Must place a hand on the mirror and speak a word that connotes protection, ward, or defense, and Must hold the image of their own body being protected by the word.”
Seraphine, without waiting for a proposal, walked to the Abjuration mirror. She placed her palm On the surface. She said, in her low continental murmur:
“Sanctuaire.”
The French word for sanctuary. The mirror rippled. The ship in the storm acquired, for a brief Moment, a visible shimmer of light around its hull — a warding shimmer — and then the chime Sounded, a third note, and the scene dissolved. Three mirrors complete.
“Transmutation fourth,” said Tobin. “The lightning-mirror. The interaction for Transmutation is More subtle. It requires two people to place their hands simultaneously on the mirror, one on Each side, and to mentally envision a transformation of some simple object — the object they hold Between them. The mirror will confirm by showing the transformation.”
Tobin looked at me. “Aldric and — let us say Ysolde.”
I took out from my inner pocket the small piece of bread I had been saving from breakfast. I Walked to the Transmutation mirror. Ysolde joined me on the other side. I placed my right palm On the mirror’s left side. Ysolde placed her left palm on the mirror’s right side. With our free Hands, we each held a corner of the piece of bread between us.
“What shall we transform it into?” Ysolde asked.
“Toast,” I said, because transmuting bread into toast was the simplest transformation I could Envision without academic distraction. She laughed, quietly.
“Toast it is.”
We closed our eyes. We envisioned the bread becoming toast — darker, drier, warmer, toasted on Both sides. For perhaps seven seconds, we held the vision together. The mirror shifted. The Lightning-scene dissolved and was replaced, for a moment, by an image of a piece of bread on a Floor becoming, by visible degrees, a piece of toast. The bread between our fingers — and here I Must record a small detail that I would not have expected — the bread between our fingers actually Transformed. It became, in our hands, genuine toast, warm and crisp. Ysolde’s eyebrows went up. The chime sounded — fourth note. The scene dissolved. Four mirrors complete.
“We got toast,” said Ysolde, looking at the bread. “Out of a puzzle-mirror.”
“Keep it,” said Tobin. “It will be a story at a later fire.”
“Divination fifth,” Tobin continued. “The pool-mirror. The interaction for Divination is that Someone must place both palms on the mirror and ask a question of it. The question must be a Genuine question the asker genuinely does not know the answer to, and the mirror will provide A partial answer.”
“Who should ask?” I said.
“The one with the most useful question, I would think,” said Tobin.
We looked at one another. I felt, after a moment, that the right person for this was Tobin himself, Because Tobin carried the most sophisticated questions about the dreamer and the lattice, and Because Tobin had asked, in his private walk with Pell at the grove, many questions the rest of Us did not know the full shape of, and because Tobin’s own long history with this work had Accumulated a set of questions that the dreamer’s mirrors might be better placed than the rest Of us to address.
Tobin, without objection, walked to the Divination mirror. He placed both palms on its surface. He thought for a moment. He said, aloud, in a steady voice:
“Is Pell’s Attendant among those who can be recovered when the binding fails?”
I felt the whole party still around me at the hearing of this question. Tobin had been carrying This question, presumably, for longer than any of us had been alive. He had asked it in what was, To all of us, the cleanest possible register — no rhetorical softening, no distancing, just the Direct plain question of an old man asking about the beloved of an old friend.
The mirror rippled. The image of the pool darkened. After perhaps ten seconds, the reflection of The woman in the scene turned her face toward Tobin through the mirror, and she nodded, once, Slowly. The chime sounded — the fifth note, warm and round. The scene dissolved. Five mirrors Complete.
Tobin lowered his hands. He stepped back. He was, I saw, briefly wiping his eyes with the back Of his sleeve, in the way Tobin did when a thing had moved him and he did not wish the party to Make much of it. We did not make much of it. We moved on.
“Enchantment sixth,” said Tobin, his voice a touch rougher than usual but steady. “The dancing- Crowd mirror. The interaction for Enchantment is that two people must place their hands on the Mirror simultaneously, and each must speak a word of refusal — a word that rejects compulsion, Imposed will, or enchantment. The two words need not be the same word. They must both be genuine Refusals from the speakers.”
I looked at Balthazar. He looked at me. We walked together to the Enchantment mirror. I placed My right palm on the left side. He placed his left palm on the right. We closed our eyes briefly. I said, firmly:
“I refuse.”
Balthazar said, in his full honest voice without the Balthazar-third-person:
“No.”
The mirror rippled. The uniform smiles on the faces of the dancing crowd vanished, all at once, And the expressions resolved into a mixture of the ordinary human expressions that a crowd of People would display — some bored, some happy, some tired, some irritated, some distracted. The Dancing itself slowed and dissolved. The chime sounded — sixth note, slightly discordant in a way That was, I thought, deliberate, the discordance that refuses gracefully rather than harmoniously. The scene dissolved. Six mirrors complete.
“Illusion last,” said Tobin. “The flying-figure mirror. The interaction for Illusion is the most Subtle of the seven. It requires all five of us to approach the mirror and place our palms on it Simultaneously, and each of us must mentally acknowledge that we are seeing an illusion — that We are conscious of the appearance being an appearance and not the truth. The mirror will then Show us the truth beneath the illusion.”
We gathered at the Illusion mirror. The mirror was perhaps three feet wide, so five of us fitting Our palms around its frame was a tight arrangement, but we managed. I placed my palm at the left Edge. Ysolde placed hers above mine. Tobin placed his at the top. Balthazar placed his below Mine. Seraphine placed hers at the right edge. We each closed our eyes. We each acknowledged, Silently, that we were seeing an illusion.
The mirror rippled — more powerfully than any of the previous ripples — and the image shifted. The figure-in-air, which had appeared to be suspended without support, resolved into its true Form: a figure standing on the ground, quite ordinarily, with the rocky desert beneath and Around them. The flying appearance had been, as I had suspected, an illusion. The figure was Earthbound. Always had been. The chime sounded — seventh note, resolving the sequence into a Full chord. The scene dissolved. Seven mirrors complete.
We stepped back from the mirror. The whole chamber pulsed once, gently, and a soft light bloomed From the domed ceiling. On the far side of the chamber, directly opposite the door we had entered, A new archway dissolved into view, previously invisible, and beyond it the passage continued Onward toward the lattice-chamber.
We had solved the first puzzle.
Reader, I will tell you, I felt in my chest the thrill of a scholar whose long years of study had, At last, produced a concrete and consequential result in a field setting. I had read about the Seven schools for forty years. I had read about their applications, their histories, their Theoretical foundations, their classical mirror-representations in medieval manuscripts, their Later reformulations, their modern syntheses. I had never, until this hour, applied my knowledge To anything more consequential than an examination I had sat for in my twenty-third year. And in The application, the knowledge had been — not quite sufficient on its own, but sufficient enough, With the help of my companions’ courage and willingness. I had identified the seven schools. I Had arranged the order. I had directed the interactions. The party had executed. The puzzle had Yielded.
I turned to my companions. They were all looking at me with expressions of quiet approval that Were, collectively, the most gratifying thing I had seen in my scholar’s life. Ysolde was grinning. Balthazar was giving me the small eyebrow-raise that was his grudging compliment. Seraphine was Smiling her rare soft smile. Tobin was nodding in the slow satisfied way of a grandfather whose Grandchild has just performed exactly as the grandfather had hoped.
“Well done, Brother,” said Tobin.
“Well done, Aldric,” said Ysolde.
“Balthazar notes, for the record, that Balthazar is impressed,” said Balthazar, “and Balthazar Does not often permit himself to use that word.”
“Impeccable,” said Seraphine. “Your matching of the stone-wall mirror to Conjuration rather than Transmutation was the most elegant part of the reasoning. Most scholars would have erred there.”
“Thank you,” I said. I found, to my surprise, that I was slightly out of breath, as though I had Been running rather than standing. The intellectual exertion of the puzzle had been considerable, And I had not noticed my own physical response to it until the release.
“Shall we continue?” asked Ysolde.
“Let us take a brief moment,” said Tobin. “Aldric has done hard work. A pause will serve us well Before we enter the final passage.”
We paused, perhaps five minutes, sitting on the cool pale floor of the chamber while the soft Light from the domed ceiling continued to play across its surface. I took out my tome. I wrote Briefly of what had happened, in the careful shorthand I used for field entries that I would Later expand. The party sat around me, quiet, each in their own thoughts.
After perhaps five minutes, Tobin stood. “Friends. The next passage leads to the second ice- Shield, beyond which is the lattice-chamber. We should proceed while our strength is full.”
We stood. We walked through the new archway. The passage beyond continued at a gentle down- Slope, and the fragments of the listening-hall chorus, which had faded during the puzzle-chamber, Began to return to our hearing as we descended, and the great slow hum beneath them deepened Further.
As I walked, I reflected on the puzzle. I reflected that the builders of the Vale had set the Puzzle not to exclude visitors but to ensure that any visitors who reached the lattice-chamber Had demonstrated, through the solving, a working familiarity with the magical framework the Lattice had been built upon. The puzzle was an admission-test. It was not a test to kill or exclude. It was a test to confirm that the visitors understood what they were approaching. And I had, by The grace of my scholarly formation and by the cooperation of my companions, passed the test.
I reflected further that the Guild had not warned us about the puzzle. The chapter had not Mentioned it. The Guild had expected us, presumably, to reach it unprepared and to either solve It by blunder or to be turned back. They had gambled on the field-party’s magical competence and Had not provided support. But we had prepared. Pell had prepared us. My own formation had Prepared me. Tobin’s previous experience had prepared him. The party’s coordination, developed Across three weeks of shared journey, had prepared all of us. The puzzle had been solvable for Us because we had become, by slow degrees, a party capable of solving it.
This was vindication. This was the vindication of every scholar who had been told his knowledge Was too abstract to matter in the practical world. This was the vindication of forty years of Reading by candlelight in quiet libraries. This was the vindication of a life lived in books. The books had mattered. The books had been, in this particular hour, the specific preparation That the work had required, and I had been the one equipped by the books, and the work had been Done.
I walked on. The passage continued. The fragments whispered. The hum deepened. Somewhere ahead, The second ice-shield waited, and beyond it the lattice-chamber, and within that the dreamer in Its full register.
Tobin, walking behind me now — he had taken the rear position as I walked, as sometimes happened When Tobin wished to have a private word with the person in front of him — said softly, “Aldric.”
“Tobin.”
“You did well in there, Brother.”
“Thank you.”
“Your grandfather’s grandfather would have been proud.”
I felt, at this, a small quick tightening in my throat. “Thank you, Tobin. That means a great Deal to me.”
“He was a scholar too, you know.”
“I — I had known that he was educated, yes.”
“He was a scholar of exactly the sort of paleography you have become. He studied for some decades At a small academy in the eastern provinces whose library was one of the few that held genuine Vale-script manuscripts at that time. He was the one who, having studied those manuscripts, brought The small set of texts back to his home region and established the private reading-tradition that Your grandfather learned from, and your father learned from, and you learned from. The chain of Scholarship between him and you is unbroken across five generations, with the particular focus On Vale-script maintained all along. Pell gave him the manuscripts when he was a young man. Pell And your grandfather’s grandfather were, for some years, frequent correspondents. Pell has the Letters, somewhere in his cottage. Perhaps one day, when we return to Pell’s grove, he will let You read them.”
“Tobin,” I said. “Is — is the puzzle — ”
“No, Brother. I am not suggesting the puzzle was rigged in your favor. The puzzle was as set by The builders. But your equipment for solving it was the equipment a long chain of seeding had Prepared. Pell began the chain. Your grandfather’s grandfather transmitted it. You have completed It.”
I walked on for some paces in silence. The scholar’s thrill of the puzzle’s completion had Transformed, in me, into a deeper quieter feeling that was not thrill but something closer to Acceptance. Acceptance of the shape of my own life. Acceptance of the continuity that ran from Pell through five generations of my family to me, with my formation as the particular final Expression of that continuity. Acceptance of the fact that I had not come to this hour by Accident.
I said, at length, “Tobin. Thank you for telling me.”
“You are welcome, Brother.”
“Does Pell intend to tell me more?”
“Pell intends to tell you as much as you have patience to hear, Brother, when next you are at His cottage. Which, with Gaialilith’s kindness, we shall be within the month.”
“Good. I will look forward to the visit.”
“So shall he.”
We walked on. The hum deepened. The fragments multiplied. Ahead, dimly visible now through the Pale dust of the passage, the second ice-shield was becoming resolvable — thicker than the first, Denser, with a deeper shimmer. Beyond it, the lattice-chamber waited.
I lifted my cowl slightly. I invoked its active, briefly, to read the inscription above the Ice-shield’s arch, which I could just barely resolve from our current distance. The inscription Read, in the Vale-script:
“Enter here with the four who have brought you. Enter here with the word, the intention, the Understanding, and the care. Enter here as yourselves. The dreamer waits. Be yourselves when The dreamer greets you. Masks are welcomed at the threshold but will not be admitted past it. Come as you are.”
I dropped the cowl. I turned to the party. I spoke, plainly:
“The inscription above the final ice-shield instructs us to enter as ourselves. Whatever masks We have carried, we are asked to set them down at the threshold. The dreamer will not accept Concealed presentations.”
Seraphine, at my side, inclined her head once. “I had suspected as much. Thank you for the Confirmation, Brother.”
“Shall we proceed?” asked Ysolde.
“We shall proceed,” said Tobin.
We walked the last forty paces to the second ice-shield. We stood before it. The shield was, As Tobin had said, thicker than the first — its shimmer deeper, its cold-radiance more pronounced. Through it, dimly, I could make out the outline of a great open chamber, very large, with a low Roof supported by columns, and at the center of the chamber a structure I could not resolve.
“One at a time, as before,” said Tobin. “Speak your consent. But at this threshold, speak also The mask you are setting down. The dreamer requires that we name what we are relinquishing in Order to enter.”
We looked at one another. Each of us, I understood, was running the quick interior audit of what Mask we were carrying, and what we would name. I was, I realized, carrying the mask of the Detached scholar — the mask of one who studies without being changed. I was going to have to Set that mask down. I could do it. It was not, at this hour, a difficult relinquishment, because I had been letting it slip for weeks.
“I shall go first,” said Tobin. “Watch me, and follow.”
Tobin walked to the edge of the shield. He spoke:
“I, Tobin Whittlehouse, enter with word, with intention, with understanding, and with care. I Come to the dreamer in consent. I set down the mask of the patient grandfather. I enter as the Man beneath, who has been waiting for this hour across three lifetimes, and who asks the dreamer’s Forgiveness for his long impatience.”
He stepped through. His passage took perhaps four seconds. He emerged on the other side visibly More upright than he had been — the grandfatherly amble replaced by the straighter bearing of a Younger man. Ysolde, watching him emerge, drew a small sharp breath at the transformation.
She stepped forward. She spoke:
“I, Ysolde Kerrigan, enter with word, with intention, with understanding, and with care. I come To the dreamer in consent. I set down the mask of the open-hearted scout. I enter as the woman Beneath, who has been grievin’ for her gran these twenty-six years and has been carryin’ the Weight of a lost mother’s scoldin’ that her gran would never have given her, and who asks the Dreamer’s help in settin’ it down.”
She stepped through. Her passage took perhaps three seconds. She emerged with her shoulders Visibly lighter, her step easier. She turned and smiled at us.
Balthazar went next. He walked to the edge of the shield. He paused. He spoke, in his honest Voice without the third-person:
“I am Balthazar Vex. I enter with word, with intention, with understanding, and with care. I Come to the dreamer in consent. I set down the mask of the twice-drowned cynic. I enter as the Boy of the cathedral kitchen, who was loved by Sister Clemence and who went to sea because he Was afraid of how much he had loved her, and who asks the dreamer’s permission to feel the love Again after all these years.”
He stepped through. His passage took perhaps five seconds. He emerged with tears on his face, Which he did not bother to wipe. He walked to stand beside Tobin, and Tobin put a hand briefly On his shoulder.
I went next. I walked to the edge. I spoke:
“I, Aldric Thornebane of the Veil, enter with word, with intention, with understanding, and With care. I come to the dreamer in consent. I set down the mask of the detached scholar. I Enter as the reader beneath, who has read the chapter aright, and who is willing to be changed By what he reads, and who asks the dreamer’s welcome as one reader to another.”
I stepped through. The shield’s cold was not the grievous cold of the first; it was a warmer Cold, a welcoming cold, the cold of a lecture hall in winter whose professor has been waiting For the student to arrive. My passage took perhaps four seconds. I emerged with a lightness in My chest I had not felt since my twenty-third year.
Seraphine went last. She walked to the edge. She paused. She looked at the shield for perhaps Ten seconds before speaking. Then she spoke, in a voice I had not heard her use before — lower Than her continental murmur, more direct, with none of the performance of courtly composure:
“I enter with word, with intention, with understanding, and with care. I come to the dreamer in Consent. I set down the mask of the Thrice-Masked. I set down the second mask also. I set down The third mask. I enter as Amelie’s granddaughter. I ask the dreamer to receive me as that girl, And to forgive me the thirty-five years I have kept her silent.”
She stepped through. Her passage took perhaps seven seconds — longer than any of ours. She Emerged on the other side, and I saw — reader, I confess I had never expected to see this — I saw Seraphine de Valmont-Lissaria with tears openly on her face, and her hands no longer clasped but Hanging loosely at her sides, and her posture no longer the trained straightness of an operative But the easier carriage of a woman who had, for the first time in her adult life, come into a Room as herself.
She walked to Tobin. Tobin, without speaking, opened his arms, and Seraphine stepped into them And was held briefly, and then she stepped back, and Tobin wiped her face with the corner of his Sleeve with the same grandfatherly efficiency he used for every practical task, and Seraphine Allowed it.
We stood, the five of us, on the inner side of the second ice-shield. We stood in the Antechamber to the lattice-chamber. The soft hum of the dreamer was now a clear deep audible Presence filling the air, a tone of welcome and patience and attention.
We had crossed.
We had come as ourselves.
The lattice-chamber lay just ahead, its outline now fully visible through the antechamber’s low- Columned passage. At the center of the chamber stood a structure I could now make out: a broad Low dais, rising perhaps three feet from the floor, and upon the dais a single pale-stone Object — the artifact that sustained the binding. The artifact was small. Perhaps the size of A human head. A geometric form, faceted, faintly glowing with a deep violet light.
The dreamer waited.
We walked forward.
Segment 19: A Sailor’s Trap in a Dry Place
Call me, still, Balthazar, and call me that one more time with the particular emphasis that a man reserves for a name when the name is about to be involved in a piece of business he had not seen coming and that the name will, for the rest of its bearer’s life, be inseparable from. For the business I am about to set down, reader, caught me unprepared in ways I had believed myself no longer capable of being caught, and the catching was, in its particular register, illuminating. It illuminated, among other things, that the old man had been a sailor all along, and that the sailor the old man had been had never entirely gone away, and that the sailor could, on short notice in a dry country beneath the earth of a civilization eight thousand years dead, still do the one thing he had been trained to do by three decades on the open water: he could read a deck.
I had come into the antechamber of the lattice-chamber with my cheeks still wet from the passage through the second ice-shield, where I had, for the first time in my adult life, set down the third-person mutter that I had used to keep my feelings at Balthazar’s arm’s length for forty years, and had entered in my ordinary first-person voice as the boy I had been before the sea had reconfigured me. The entering had been considerable. I do not propose to narrate its interior further; I narrated enough of it at the passage itself, and what remained of it belonged to me alone. I will say only that my companions had each performed similar relinquishments at the shield, and that the five of us now stood in the antechamber with our masks left behind on the outer side, and we were going forward toward the dais and the faceted violet object at its center as ourselves, and the as-ourselves-ness was, for each of us, a new and not entirely settled condition.
The antechamber was large — perhaps forty paces across, roughly rectangular, with a low roof supported by four rows of squat columns of the pale grown-granite, each column perhaps twelve feet tall and carved with the same glyph-work that had decorated the corridors above. The light in the chamber was softer than the passages had been; it came not from the pale wall-crystals that had lit our descent but from the violet object itself, which glowed at a steady gentle pulse and cast its light across the expanse of the chamber in long radiating beams that produced, on the floor, a pattern of pale-violet and pale-gray panels corresponding to the arrangement of the columns. The object, from this distance — perhaps thirty paces away across the chamber — looked smaller than it had seemed from the shield, and at the same time more self-contained, as though its light were reaching us from a greater inward distance than the physical distance alone accounted for.
Ysolde led. Ysolde always led, and even now, with her shoulders lighter and her face composed in the quiet post-weeping settlement of a woman who had just set down a twenty-six-year grief at a threshold, she led. Her gait was slower than her usual gait, which I took to reflect both the weight of the occasion and the fact that her scout’s instinct was, in this medium, running through a full inventory of the unfamiliar before committing the party to any particular pace. I walked second behind her. Aldric third. Tobin fourth. Seraphine, uncharacteristically, fifth — she had, at the shield’s emergence, told Tobin in a very quiet voice that she preferred to walk the rear for the moment because she wished to cry without her companions looking at her face, and Tobin had nodded without comment and had taken the fourth position, leaving Seraphine the back, and this had been the arrangement we walked into the antechamber with.
Ysolde’s first words, when we had walked perhaps ten paces into the chamber, were: “The floor isn’t right.”
Reader, here is where the segment begins in earnest, so I will ask your attention to shift into the slower more careful reading that the explanation requires, because the nature of the hazard that revealed itself in the next minute was a specific hazard of a specific medium that I, Balthazar, alone of the party was professionally trained to read, and the reading of it is the whole of what I am here to describe.
A ship’s deck, reader, is a construction that teaches its occupants to read the world through their feet. A landsman, walking a solid floor, does not read the floor through his feet; he walks upon it without consulting it, because the floor of the landsman’s world is, in ordinary circumstances, a reliable and passive substrate that does what floors do, which is to stay still and bear weight. A sailor, walking a ship’s deck, cannot afford the landsman’s ease. The deck is not still. The deck is, at every moment, one plane of a complex system of moving surfaces that are responding, beneath the sailor’s feet, to the action of the ocean against the ship’s hull. The deck rises and falls with the swell. The deck tilts with the wind in the sails. The deck pitches with the ship’s forward motion through uneven water. The deck yaws when the rudder turns. The deck twists when two waves arrive from different directions. And the sailor, if he is to survive more than a season, must learn to read, through the soles of his boots, the entire book of the deck’s motion — and must learn to do so without looking at his feet, because looking at his feet means not looking at the work he is doing with his hands, and the work with the hands is what the ship pays him for, and the reading with the feet must therefore be automatic, subconscious, continuous, and reliable.
A sailor of thirty years develops, by the thousandth day, what we call sea-legs. The term is literal. The legs themselves have been re-educated. The inner ear, through long training, has been calibrated to a different baseline of expected motion. The muscles of the feet, the ankles, the knees, the hips, the lower back — all of them operate on a continuous cybernetic loop with the deck’s feedback, and the loop runs faster than thought, and the loop corrects the sailor’s balance before the sailor himself has consciously registered that a correction is needed. The sailor does not stand on the deck. The sailor is one with the deck. And when the deck does something sudden — a sudden roll, a sudden pitch, a sudden violent lurch of the sort that throws landsmen across the deck and down into the scuppers — the sailor does not lurch. The sailor’s legs have already begun to compensate before the lurch is complete. The sailor’s body has converted the sudden motion of the deck into a small adjustment of the hips and a small flexing of the knees and a small redistribution of weight across the feet, and the sailor remains upright while the landsmen go tumbling.
I had not walked a deck in eleven years. I had believed, when I took to land for good, that my sea-legs would degrade along with the rest of the habits of my seafaring life, and that within two or three years I would walk again as a landsman walks. I was mistaken about this. The sea-legs, once trained at the depth my three decades had trained mine, do not degrade. They subside into a latent condition, but they remain. They remain in the inner ear, in the muscles, in the calibration of the balance-system, in the cybernetic loop. And they wake — I am now in a position to testify — when the floor beneath the sailor does something the sailor’s feet recognize from the sea.
Ysolde had said, the floor isn’t right.
I stopped. I had, within the same half-second of her speaking, felt it too. A tiny shift. A very small tilt in the pale-stone panels of the floor beneath me. The tilt was, by my sea-legs’ internal scale, no more than three degrees. A landsman would not have registered it at all. A trained scout, as Ysolde was, might have registered it as a subtle imbalance in her footing. My sea-legs had registered it at the level of the inner ear, and my inner ear had translated the registration into a signal that ran up through the vagus nerve to the part of the brain that attends to bodily threat, and the signal had arrived at my consciousness in the form of a single involuntary word that I spoke aloud before I had decided to speak:
“Hold.”
The party froze.
I had spoken the word in my ordinary voice, but with an edge to it that I had not heard from my own mouth in eleven years, the edge of the sailor on watch who has perceived a change in the ship’s behavior and is ordering the rest of the crew to stop doing whatever they were doing and to wait for his assessment. The party froze because the edge had carried the authority of the watch. I had not consciously put the authority in the voice. The voice had remembered, from eleven years previous, how to produce it.
I stood very still. I closed my eyes for perhaps two seconds — this is what a sailor does, reader, when he needs to read a deck more precisely; he closes his eyes, because sight is a distraction to the feet — and I listened to the floor through my boots. The tilt had continued, by very small increments, since my initial detection. The floor beneath my feet, which was perhaps ten paces into the chamber, was currently at approximately four degrees of tilt, rising toward the entrance of the chamber and falling toward the dais. The tilt was continuing to increase at a rate I estimated to be approximately one degree per four seconds. Within perhaps forty seconds, the floor would be at ten degrees of tilt. Within perhaps ninety seconds, twenty degrees. Within perhaps three minutes, forty-five degrees — vertical enough to slide any object, including any unanchored human being, down toward whatever lay at the low end of the slope.
But the tilt was not the whole of what my feet were reading. Beneath the tilt, I could feel — faintly, through the soles — a second signal: a hollow quality to the panels at the far end of the chamber, in the vicinity of the dais. Hollow. Not solid. The panels nearer the dais were not, as they appeared, continuous with the bedrock. They were thin — a layer of pale stone perhaps a few inches thick, resting on some supporting structure beneath, and the supporting structure was responsible for the current increasing tilt, because the supporting structure was, by the evidence of the floor’s behavior, a hinged or pivoting mechanism.
The floor was a trap.
The floor was a specific trap of a specific kind that I had not, in my life, encountered in a dry place, but that I had encountered at sea: the tilting-deck trap. Pirates of certain regions had been known, when boarding a more heavily armed vessel, to deploy a device that tilted the ship’s deck beneath the defenders’ feet at an increasing angle, using a series of hinged sections, causing the defenders to lose their footing and slide down the deck toward a lower position where the pirates waited. The device worked on landsmen because landsmen did not have the calibration to compensate for the tilt before they lost their balance. The device did not work on sailors, because sailors, reading the tilt through their feet, adjusted their stance automatically and remained upright. The trap before us, in this dry place, was the architectural cousin of that nautical device.
And at the low end of the tilt, where the panels would eventually slide any unanchored person, was the dais. But I did not believe, reading the hollow-quality of the far panels, that the dais was the destination. I believed the dais was surrounded by a hollow section of floor that, at a sufficient tilt, would give way and drop whatever had slid down it into whatever pit lay beneath.
I opened my eyes.
“Tobin,” I said, in the voice I had just remembered I possessed. “The floor is a trap. It is tilting toward the dais at increasing angle. The far panels, within perhaps six paces of the dais, are hollow and will give way when sufficient weight is pressed on them at angle. Do not move yet. I am going to describe what I think is happening. Each of you please remain exactly where you stand.”
“Aye, Balthazar,” said Tobin, who, to his credit, did not argue.
I described. I described the tilt, the rate of its increase, the hollow-quality of the far panels, and my assessment of the trap’s design. I spoke quickly but precisely. I used the sailor’s vocabulary of list and pitch and yaw, which were not entirely correct for the landed context but were the vocabulary my mouth had available on short notice. The party listened without interrupting. Ysolde, I noted, had already lowered her center of gravity by slightly bending her knees — her scout’s instinct had, on no more than my word, begun the compensation that would serve a landsman best. Aldric had not moved, but his face showed the intense concentration of a scholar processing new information against the body of known trap-typologies from his reading, and I judged that he was cross-referencing my description with something he had read. Tobin was calm, as Tobin always was, and I saw him glance at his own feet and adjust his stance very slightly to match the tilt — Tobin, I now understood beyond doubt, had also walked a deck at some point in his long life, because his adjustment was the sailor’s adjustment.
Seraphine, at the rear, had gone still in the particular way of an operative who has received a threat-assessment and is running her own internal inventory. She said, in a low voice that reached my ear clearly across the room, “Balthazar. Your recommendation.”
Reader, I will tell you that in this moment, something I had not experienced in eleven years of land-dwelling happened inside me. The decision-making function that I had used at sea — the sailor-captain’s function, which was the function of assessing a hazardous situation, generating an action plan, and directing a small crew to execute it, all within the span of seconds — came back online. It came back, not with rust, but with the clean immediacy of a tool that had been stored oiled in its chest and was now being lifted out for its first use after long storage. I had been a first mate by thirty and a captain by thirty-five, though I had not kept the captaincy long, and though I had not spoken of any of it to the party. The captain in me, reader, had been sleeping beneath the sailor’s muttering for a decade. He woke now. He spoke with my mouth.
“We have approximately forty seconds before the tilt exceeds the angle a landsman can hold against without bracing,” I said. “Seraphine, you are closest to the entrance. Move back across the threshold. The floor does not tilt on that side; the trap’s mechanism extends only into the chamber proper. Tobin, you are second-closest. Move with Seraphine. You have deck-sense, but I do not want you on this floor when it reaches steep tilt. Aldric, your center of gravity is high and you have no deck-training. Move back with them. Ysolde, you are further in than the others but you have scout-balance and a low center of gravity; you will be able to walk back at the current tilt, but do so within the next fifteen seconds before it steepens. All four of you move now. I will remain on the chamber floor and read the mechanism.”
“Balthazar — ” began Tobin.
“Tobin. Not now. Go.”
Tobin went. This, reader, was the first occasion in the entire acquaintance between Tobin and myself on which Tobin had accepted a direct instruction from me without any interior comment, and I read the acceptance as his confirmation that the situation required a sailor’s captain and that I was the appropriate one to fill the role. The acceptance, coming from Tobin, whose own deck-sense I had just inferred, was the professional courtesy of one captain yielding his command to the senior captain present on the active matter.
Seraphine, Tobin, and Aldric backed carefully to the threshold. The tilt at their positions was less severe, being nearer the chamber’s entrance; they made the retreat without incident. Ysolde, further in, had to walk a diagonal path of perhaps eight paces across an already four-degree tilt, and I watched her do it with the nervous attention of a captain watching a crewman on a yardarm. She made the walk. She reached the threshold. She turned and looked at me.
“Balthazar. What are you doing?”
“Reading the mechanism.”
“You said the floor will tilt to forty-five degrees within three minutes.”
“I did.”
“You’ll slide into the pit.”
“I will not. I have deck-sense, which will keep me upright through approximately thirty degrees of tilt, and before I reach thirty degrees I will have identified the mechanism’s trigger-point and the method for disabling it. If I do not, I will retreat across the floor before the tilt exceeds my ability to hold.”
“Balthazar — ”
“Ysolde. I am the one with the skill for this. The others are not. I will do it. Please stand clear.”
She stood clear. She did not look pleased about it. But she understood, as Tobin had understood, the allocation of skills. Seraphine, at the threshold behind her, said quietly, “Balthazar. Be careful.”
I did not answer. I had no voice to spare for reassurances. I turned back toward the dais and began to walk, slowly and with the slightly spread stance that a sailor uses on a three-degree tilting deck, toward the center of the chamber. My feet were reading the floor with every step. The tilt was, as I had estimated, continuing to increase by approximately one degree per four seconds.
I had walked perhaps six paces, reaching the center of the chamber where the tilt was steeper — I judged it to be approaching seven degrees, more than a landsman could easily hold — when two things happened in rapid succession that altered the situation.
The first was that the floor emitted a low grinding sound — the first sound, other than our own voices and footsteps, that I had heard in the chamber — and the tilt accelerated. Suddenly the rate of increase was no longer one degree per four seconds but something closer to one degree per second. Within perhaps eight seconds the floor would reach fifteen degrees. This was faster than I had expected, and the acceleration meant the mechanism had detected my presence at the chamber’s center and was now actively working against me.
The second was that I heard, behind me, a sharp exclamation from Aldric, and the sound of something falling, and I turned — while keeping my feet adjusted to the increasing tilt — to see that Aldric, at the threshold, had stepped forward perhaps one pace toward the chamber, apparently involuntarily, and had in doing so discovered that the threshold-region was not in fact as stable as I had judged, because Aldric had lost his footing and was now on one knee with his hands scrabbling at the edge of the floor’s first panel, which was itself beginning to tilt.
And a second voice, further in — Ysolde’s — was calling out, “Aldric! Grab the column!”
And I saw, with the peripheral clarity of a captain’s instant assessment, that Ysolde had lunged back into the chamber to catch Aldric’s arm, and that Ysolde, whose scout-balance had served her on four-degree tilt, was now also encountering the accelerated steepening of the floor, and that Ysolde’s weight, combined with Aldric’s, on a panel that had just begun to tilt from the threshold side, was producing a secondary tilt that was threatening both of them.
Two of my companions. Two of the four I had come to love. In the path of a trap whose mechanism I had, a moment earlier, been directing them away from, and who had nonetheless been caught by the trap’s secondary activation, because the trap was cleverer than I had read it to be on first examination. The trap had anticipated that its primary mechanism would draw attention, and had deployed a secondary mechanism — tilting the threshold itself — to catch the companions who thought themselves safely removed.
I had perhaps three seconds to decide what to do.
Reader, I will tell you that the decision came to me without deliberation. The captain in me did not weigh options. The captain saw two crewmen at risk, and the captain moved.
I turned — keeping my weight low, my knees flexed, my feet planted wide — and I began to move back across the chamber at the running-walk that a sailor uses on a thirty-degree deck, which is a gait that would look, to a landsman, preposterous and undignified, but which is the gait that keeps the sailor upright while covering ground at speed. My feet knew the angle of the floor better than my eyes did. I was reading the surface through my boots, adjusting my center of gravity in micro-increments, bracing each step with the particular spread-footed planting that a sailor’s knees can sustain for short bursts even at angles that would throw a landsman prone.
I reached the threshold panel in perhaps four seconds. Aldric was still on one knee, his right hand gripping the edge of the first column, his left arm stretched out toward Ysolde. Ysolde was perhaps three feet from him, on both knees now, her left hand gripping Aldric’s forearm, her right hand clawing at a crack in the pale stone for purchase. The threshold panel beneath them was at approximately fifteen degrees of tilt and rising. If either of them lost grip, they would slide down into the chamber proper, where the main floor was now at approximately twenty degrees and accelerating, and the hollow panels at the far end awaited whoever slid that far.
Tobin and Seraphine, from the outside of the threshold — the passage side, which was still level — were reaching forward, Tobin with one hand outstretched toward Aldric’s right hand on the column, Seraphine with her own hands braced against the doorframe and a piece of good hemp rope already in her grip, unreeling from somewhere on her person. Neither of them could reach the two on the chamber side without themselves being pulled onto the tilting panel, and neither of them was making that mistake.
I was the one on the chamber side. I was the one with the sea-legs.
I crossed the last two feet to Aldric in the rapid adjusted gait of a sailor running up a pitching deck to catch a dropped spar before it fell. I reached him. I did not grab him — grabbing an unanchored man on a tilting surface would have added my unbalance to his, and we would both have gone together. Instead, I wrapped my left arm around the nearest column, locked my left hand onto my own right wrist in a chained grip of the sort that sailors use when they need to anchor themselves to a fixed point under storm conditions, and I reached my right arm out to Aldric, gripping his shirt at the shoulder-seam, which was a grip that would hold the full weight of him without tearing because good linen shirts of his era were sewn for stress.
“Aldric,” I said. “Let go of the column. Grab my arm at the elbow. Put your weight on me. I have you.”
Aldric, to his scholar’s credit, did not hesitate. He released his grip on the column, reached up, and locked his hand onto my right forearm at the elbow. The moment he did, his full weight came onto my right side, and I felt the pull in my left arm where it was locked around the column — a considerable pull, and an anchor-point that was, for the duration, my entire stability.
Now Ysolde. Aldric, with his left arm, was still holding Ysolde’s forearm. Ysolde was still on both knees, still clawing at the floor for purchase that she was not finding. The tilt of the threshold panel was now approaching eighteen degrees, and Ysolde’s body was slipping downward by inches.
“Aldric,” I said, “Ysolde. We’re going to do this together. Ysolde, on my count, let go of the floor and grab Aldric’s belt at his waist with both hands. Aldric, when Ysolde’s weight comes onto your belt, you pull her up the angle toward my position. I will not drop you. Ready?”
Ysolde nodded. “Aye.”
Aldric nodded. “Ready.”
“Three. Two. One. Now.”
Ysolde released the floor. She threw both her hands forward, across the three feet of tilting pale stone between herself and Aldric, and she caught Aldric’s belt at his waist, one hand on each side. Her weight, added to Aldric’s, came in a sudden lurch onto Aldric’s body, and Aldric’s weight came in a sudden lurch onto my right arm, and my right arm came in a sudden lurch onto my left anchor around the column, and for perhaps three seconds I carried the weight of two full-grown adults — Aldric perhaps eleven stone, Ysolde perhaps ten — on a body that was not as strong as it had been at thirty and had no business carrying twenty-one stone of hanging human weight at my present age.
But I had been a captain. A captain, reader, does not let go. A captain does not calculate whether his strength is adequate. A captain locks his grip and holds until the crewman is aboard. The grip is not optional. The grip is the captain. If the grip fails, the crewman dies, and the captain is no longer a captain; he is the survivor of a failed crew-recovery, which is the worst condition a captain can be reduced to, worse than his own death, worse than his own drowning, worse than any private loss. I had seen captains who had lost crewmen in this manner and had never recovered from the losing. I had seen one captain of my young years sit in the ship’s cabin for three weeks after losing a man on a yardarm and had seen him emerge from the three weeks a permanently diminished man. I would not be that captain. I would hold.
I held.
Aldric, with Ysolde now on his belt, began to pull her up the angle toward my position. This was hard work for Aldric, whose upper-body strength was not his scholar’s strength, but it was the work the moment demanded, and Aldric, to his credit, did it. He pulled, his arm trembling with effort, while I held his weight steady and Ysolde scrambled her knees forward along the tilting panel.
The tilt was now at twenty degrees. The angle at which a landsman cannot stand. A sailor, with good knees, can hold perhaps twenty-five. I had, at most, perhaps fifteen more seconds before the tilt exceeded even my ability to brace.
Ysolde reached Aldric’s side. She grabbed the column with her right hand. She released Aldric’s belt with her left. She locked her left hand onto my right wrist below Aldric’s. Three of us were now hanging onto each other and the column.
“Tobin!” I shouted. “Rope!”
The moment I shouted it, Seraphine tossed the rope. She had coiled it during the preceding thirty seconds, and her throw was the efficient direct throw of a woman who had practiced such throws before; the loop came across the threshold and landed across Aldric’s shoulders with the precision of a well-cast line. Tobin, on the passage side, caught the free end and braced himself against the doorframe with his feet spread and his weight set.
“Ysolde, loop the rope under your arms,” I ordered. “Aldric, help her. The rope goes around both of you. I will release my grip on your shirt the moment the rope is secured, and Tobin will haul you both back to the threshold.”
They did it. The looping took perhaps ten seconds, during which I held both of them by the shirt and the wrist while the floor continued to steepen beneath us. When the rope was secure, I released Aldric’s shoulder-seam. Tobin hauled. Aldric and Ysolde, now supported by the rope, began to move backward across the tilting panel toward the passage. Tobin’s strength, reader, was not the strength of an ordinary grandfather; whatever life Tobin had lived, it had preserved an upper-body capacity that I would not have predicted from his ambling gait. He pulled them both, at a steady hand-over-hand pace, across the threshold’s tilting panel and into the level passage beyond. Seraphine caught Aldric’s arm at the threshold and helped him up. Ysolde followed. Both of them were across. Both of them were safe.
I remained on the chamber side.
The tilt at my position was now at approximately twenty-two degrees. I was still holding the column with my left arm and now had my right arm free. I had perhaps ten seconds before the tilt would exceed my ability to stand even with bracing.
“Balthazar!” Ysolde called. “Come back!”
“Throw the rope!”
She threw it. The loop crossed the threshold and came to rest across my shoulders. I caught it with my right hand. I looped it under my arms. I released the column. I let Tobin haul.
The tilt at my position was now twenty-three degrees. Without the column’s anchor, my feet could not hold. My sea-legs were adequate for standing without aid at up to perhaps eighteen degrees; beyond that I required a handhold. I lost my footing the moment I released the column, and I began to slide down the steepening floor toward the chamber’s interior.
Tobin’s pull was strong and steady, but the rope was now being asked to haul me uphill against a twenty-three-degree slope. For perhaps four seconds I slid downhill faster than the rope could retrieve me. I moved approximately eight feet into the chamber, toward the dais, before the net of Tobin’s pull and my own scrambling ability against the floor brought me to a stop. Then, by hand-over-hand pull, I was drawn back up the slope.
During those four seconds, reader, I had glimpsed, for the first time, the full extent of what lay beneath the hollow panels near the dais. Because the acceleration of the trap had, in these seconds, begun to cause the hollow panels to give way even without weight upon them, and I saw — briefly, as I slid and was pulled back — three of the hollow panels in the far quarter of the chamber buckle downward and disappear, revealing beneath them a pit of considerable depth, perhaps thirty feet deep, with pale-stone spikes jutting upward from the floor of the pit at irregular intervals. The spikes were aged, but they were still recognizably spikes. The pit had been designed to kill whoever was deposited into it.
I was glad, reader, that I had not been deposited into it. I was also glad that none of my companions had been deposited into it. And I was struck, briefly, by a professional admiration for the builders of the Vale, who had constructed, eight thousand years ago, a trap of such elegant sophistication that it would still, after all those millennia, catch the unwary.
Tobin hauled me back across the threshold. Seraphine caught my arm. The five of us, all of us, stood now on the level passage side of the threshold, and the chamber behind us continued to tilt for perhaps another twenty seconds until its panels had reached the full forty-five degrees that the trap apparently intended, at which point the mechanism locked into position and the floor remained, sloping steeply toward the dais and the pit surrounding it.
I sat down. I sat down heavily on the floor of the passage because my legs, which had performed creditably during the emergency, were now experiencing the particular muscular protest that follows when a man of my age has asked them to do work substantially above their current daily baseline. I sat down and I breathed.
Nobody spoke for perhaps half a minute.
Ysolde broke the silence first. She knelt down beside me. Her face was tear-streaked, though the tears were not the tears of the ice-shield’s release; these were the sharper fresher tears of a person who has just understood how close to death she was. She said, quietly, “Balthazar. You saved us.”
“I read the floor,” I muttered, turning my face slightly aside because I did not wish to be looked at directly in this moment.
“You saved us.”
“I read the floor.”
“Balthazar. Thank you.”
“Do not thank me.”
The words came out with more edge than I had intended, and I immediately softened the edge, because Ysolde did not deserve the edge, and I said, more quietly, “I mean only that thanks are not needed. I read a floor. A sailor reads floors. It is what I do. You would have done the same in my place. Let us not make it more than it was.”
Aldric was beside Ysolde now. He knelt also. He said, with the scholar’s plain seriousness, “Balthazar. Without you we would both be dead. I understand you do not wish to be thanked. I nonetheless wish to say, for the record, that I am grateful.”
“Noted,” I said. I could not, at that moment, produce the words to acknowledge the gratitude properly, and I did not try. Aldric accepted the curt response without offense. Aldric understood, I think, what I was doing.
What I was doing, reader, was managing the internal wave that had, in the four seconds during which I had slid into the chamber before being hauled back, risen in my chest and threatened to become overwhelming. The wave was this: in those four seconds, during which I had been loose on a tilting floor with a thirty-foot pit at its lower end, I had experienced — for the first time in eleven years — the specific sensation of beginning to fall toward a fatal outcome. I had felt it in my stomach. I had felt it in my inner ear. I had felt it in the particular tightening of the chest that the body performs when the body’s threat-processor has concluded that death may be imminent. And the sensation had, without any control on my part, opened a door in my interior that I had been keeping shut for eleven years, behind which was the second drowning, the drowning I did not speak of, the one that had taken me from the captaincy and the sea and had left me, at forty-six, a landsman in a port town muttering about waterskins.
The door had opened. I had seen, in the four seconds, the inside of the door again. I had seen the place I had been. I had seen why I had left.
And then Tobin’s pull had brought me back, and the door had closed, and I had been deposited onto the level passage with my companions safe and my breath heaving.
The wave was the aftershock of the door’s opening. The wave was the interior reckoning with the fact that, for four seconds, I had been back in the second drowning. And the bitter pride in my chest — the pride that would not permit me to be thanked — was the captain’s pride that had saved my two companions and had also, in saving them, exposed me to the interior I had been hiding from for a decade.
I could not explain any of this to Ysolde or Aldric in that moment. I did not try. I sat on the floor of the passage. I breathed. I waited for the wave to subside.
Tobin, who understood at least part of what I was going through, sat down beside me. He did not speak. He simply sat. His shoulder against mine. The heavy grandfatherly shoulder of a man who had walked a deck at some point in his own longer life, and who recognized in me the particular post-emergency register of a sailor who had been, for four seconds, back in water he had tried to leave.
We sat for perhaps three minutes. The chamber behind us was still. The tilted floor had locked. The pit surrounding the dais was still visible through the open threshold, the hollow panels having given way in their full extent. The violet object on the dais continued its steady pulsing glow, indifferent to the trap’s activation or to our party’s survival.
Ysolde, after the three minutes, said, “Balthazar. I understand about the thanking. I will not thank ye further. But I want to say one thing, and then I will not mention it again.”
“Say it, Ysolde.”
“Ye’re a better captain than ye’ve been lettin’ on.”
I did not look at her. I could not. I felt the wave rise one more time and subside. I said, in my ordinary voice:
“I was a captain. I stopped being one eleven years ago for reasons I do not propose to discuss. I have not been a captain since. The captain in me woke up, apparently, because the situation required it. I shall return him to sleep shortly. Please treat this as a single episode, not as a change in the character of our party.”
“Aye, Balthazar.”
“Thank you.”
“Ye’re welcome.”
Seraphine, who had remained standing and was examining the chamber through the threshold with the assessing eye of an operative, now said, “Balthazar. A question.”
“Ask, Seraphine.”
“The floor is now locked at forty-five degrees. The dais is at the bottom. The pit surrounds it. How do we reach the artifact? Is there a way through that your reading of the mechanism suggests?”
Reader, this was the question I had not yet had the time to address, because the preceding minute had been occupied with the rescue. I stood, with Tobin’s hand lightly under my elbow for support, and I examined the chamber from the threshold.
The floor was locked at forty-five degrees, sloping down from the threshold to the dais. The hollow panels had given way in three sections near the dais, opening the pit. The dais itself stood on a small pedestal in the center of the open pit, connected to the solid floor only by what appeared to be a single narrow stone bridge, perhaps a foot wide, that extended from the intact floor-edge to the dais across a distance of perhaps eight feet.
The narrow bridge had not been visible before, because it had been beneath one of the hollow panels. The panels’ collapse had exposed it. The bridge was clearly the intended safe route to the dais — the route any visitor who had survived the trap’s activation would have to use to reach the artifact.
I explained this to the party. I added: “The trap’s design suggests that the builders intended survivors to retreat to the threshold, observe the pit’s exposure, identify the bridge, and approach the dais via the bridge only after completing some further action. I do not yet know what the further action is, but I would wager it is related to the seven-mirrors puzzle we passed earlier or some similar magical confirmation.”
“Could it be,” Aldric said slowly, “that the seven-mirrors puzzle was the triggering confirmation? That having solved that puzzle, we have earned the right to pass the trap and cross the bridge?”
“Possibly,” I said. “But the trap activated, which suggests the puzzle-solution was not sufficient on its own. Perhaps the trap is designed to activate regardless, and the puzzle-solution only allows retreat rather than entering the pit. Or perhaps there is a further action required.”
“Perhaps,” Tobin said, “the further action is what we have just done — the rescue itself. Perhaps the trap is designed to test whether a visiting party’s members care for one another enough to risk themselves in rescue. Perhaps our rescue of Ysolde and Aldric, performed honestly and without hesitation, has been the confirmation.”
We considered this. It was, I thought, a plausible reading of the trap’s purpose. The trap would be a moral test as much as a physical one. A party that left its fallen members to the pit would fail the test. A party that rescued its members, even at personal risk, would pass. And the Vale’s builders, who had valued the pooled attention of contributors above all else, would have been specifically concerned that any visitors to the lattice-chamber demonstrate the capacity for interpersonal care that the pooled attention itself had been built upon.
“If Tobin is right,” Ysolde said, “then the bridge should be safe for us to cross now.”
“We can test it carefully,” said Seraphine. “One at a time, with a rope attached, so that if the bridge fails the person crossing can be hauled back.”
“Agreed,” said Tobin. “And I will go first, as I have the deck-sense to hold the rope steady if the bridge is unstable.”
We re-coiled Seraphine’s rope. Tobin tied one end around his waist. Seraphine and I together held the other end, braced against the passage’s floor.
Tobin stepped carefully onto the locked floor. The forty-five-degree slope was, even locked, a considerable challenge to walk; it required the same sea-legs gait I had used. Tobin walked it with the same technique I had used, which confirmed for me what I had already suspected — that he had, in some earlier life, walked the same decks I had.
He reached the bridge. He tested it with his weight. It held. He crossed. He reached the dais.
He did not touch the artifact. He turned back to us. He said, in his grandfatherly voice, “The bridge is safe. Come one at a time. Rope attached for safety, but I do not believe the rope will be needed.”
Ysolde crossed next. Aldric next. Seraphine next. I crossed last. My knees, which had been protesting since the rescue, protested more during the diagonal walk across the forty-five-degree slope, but they held. I reached the bridge. I crossed. I stood on the dais with the others.
The violet object was on a small pedestal at the dais’s center. It was, now that we were close to it, larger than it had appeared from the threshold — perhaps the size of two human heads stacked, and faceted into the geometric form of a twenty-sided solid. The light came from within it. The light was steady, warm despite being violet, and, I realized with a small start, the light was not merely ambient but directional — it was reaching toward each of the five of us, the facets angling to illuminate each face in turn with a soft individual radiance.
The dreamer was looking at us.
The dreamer, within the artifact, was looking at each of us directly.
I felt, at this, the small correction of my own interior state that brought the wave of post-emergency feeling to its final subsidence. The door in me that had opened during the four-second slide was now fully closed. The captain in me stepped back into his sleeping-room. The ordinary Balthazar — the boy of the cathedral kitchen, now fully awake in me since the second ice-shield — remained at the dais, meeting the dreamer’s gaze.
I did not speak. None of us spoke, yet. The moment was not for speaking.
Ysolde, beside me, put her hand on my arm. She did not speak either. She just held my arm.
I did not shake off the hand. Reader, I will tell you — I did not shake off the hand. I let her hold it. Ysolde, I now understood, had read the interior wave in me the way I had read the floor, and she was doing what she could to support me through its final subsidence without requiring me to acknowledge the support in words.
After perhaps a minute, during which we each stood in the direct soft illumination of the artifact’s individual attention, Tobin said, quietly, “Friends. The dreamer is awake to us. We should begin.”
“Begin,” said Seraphine.
“Begin,” said Ysolde.
“Begin,” said Aldric.
“Balthazar is ready,” I said, in my ordinary voice, which had resumed the third-person reference without the mutter, as a small compromise between the person I had been before the shield and the person I was becoming after. I do not know whether the compromise will hold. I suspect it will not. I suspect I will, by the time this business is done, speak as I first spoke again, and the muttering will not return. But for the moment, the compromise served.
We turned to face the artifact. Aldric, whose work this was, stepped to its front, and he opened his tome, and he prepared to speak to the dreamer in the scholarly register we had agreed upon, the register that he had revised at Tobin’s counsel from the diplomatic to the plain.
I stood at Aldric’s left. Ysolde at his right. Tobin behind him. Seraphine at Tobin’s side.
Aldric cleared his throat. He spoke. His voice was steady. He spoke what would, in the chronicle, become his long address to the Silent Witness.
But that, reader, is his segment to narrate, not mine. I will end mine here, at the dais, with the five of us standing in the dreamer’s attentive light, and with my captain’s pride still faintly present in my chest, and with Ysolde’s hand still lightly on my arm, and with the long-closed door in me — the door behind which the second drowning had lived for eleven years — now closed again, but no longer locked. The door was unlocked now. I could open it if I chose to. Not today. But perhaps, someday, in a quieter hour, with people I trusted, I would open it and let them see what was inside. Not now. Not today. But perhaps.
For now: the dreamer waited. Aldric began. The work proceeded.
I am Balthazar. I have been a sailor. I have been a captain. I have been, today, a man who read a floor and saved two of his companions from a pit eight thousand years old. I did not wish to be thanked for it, and I maintain that I did not wish to be thanked for it; but I will permit myself, in this private record, to note that I am not unproud. The pride is bitter because the pride is bound to the old wound that the rescue briefly reopened. But the pride is also, in the same moment, clean. I did the work. The work was mine to do. I did it well. The companions are alive. That is the whole of the accounting.
Ysolde’s hand remains on my arm. Aldric is speaking to the dreamer. The violet light bathes us each individually. The lattice-chamber, at last, is host to a proper conversation.
Segment 20: The Song That Should Not Be Heard
Och, reader, I must tell ye at the outset of this tellin’ that the events I will set doun happened not after Aldric’s speakin’ to the dreamer but before it — during the short pause between Balthazar’s readin’ of the tiltin’ floor and Aldric’s openin’ of his tome at the dais — and that I am narratin’ them out of order because the chronicler who is puttin’ together this record has asked me to give my own account of what happened in that small interval, which was a matter of perhaps four or five minutes by the clock of the world but which was, in the inside of my own heart, a considerable hour. I will ask ye to understand that an experience of this sort does not respect the order of a chronicle’s pages, and that what I will tell ye is what I lived through in the brief pause between the rescue and the speakin’, and that I carried what I lived through into the speakin’ and beyond, and that I am settin’ it doun here because the chronicler has said, wisely, that the speakin’ to the dreamer is Aldric’s to tell and my own wee private business at the edge of the dais is mine.
So. The five of us had just crossed the narrow bridge onto the dais. Balthazar had collapsed — I do not use the word to diminish him, I use it in the honest sense, for the man had spent his entire captain’s reserve in the minute of the rescue and his legs had reached the dais but his legs were no longer capable of the further standin’ about that the next scene would require — and he had sat doun on the pale stone beside the artifact’s pedestal, and I had sat doun beside him because Balthazar had a wee light shine of the post-emergency on him that I recognized from my own father after the winter of the ice-storm when he had pulled two of our neighbors out of a collapsed byre and had refused for a week to be thanked, and I kenned, in the way I ken these things, that Balthazar wanted company but did not want to be asked anythin’, and I was the one who could provide that company without askin’.
Aldric had walked to the front of the dais and was openin’ his tome and settlin’ himself for the long address he had been preparin’ for weeks. Seraphine was at Tobin’s side. Tobin was standin’ with his face turned toward the artifact, his hands loose at his sides, his whole body settled into that particular quiet attendin’ of a man who has come to a long-awaited hour.
I was sittin’ on the pale stone with my hand on Balthazar’s arm and my eyes driftin’ around the chamber, takin’ in the shape of it for my scout’s memory, because a scout never stops cataloguin’ even when the scout is resting, and the shape of the chamber was a shape I wanted to ken in case we needed to exit it quickly later.
And that is when I heard it.
I will describe what I heard as exact as I can, reader, because the hearin’ was the whole of the trouble.
At first it was not a song. At first it was just a — a wee thread of somethin’. Somethin’ in the air of the chamber that was not quite in the ordinary ambient hum of the dreamer and not quite in the chorus of the listenin’-hall fragments that had faded behind us. It was a third layer, beneath both of those, very faint, very far away, as if comin’ from some further passage beyond the dais and down some long corridor that the chamber’s architecture did not immediately reveal.
The thread was, I realized after perhaps ten seconds of listenin’ without quite knowin’ I was listenin’, a melody. A simple melody. Four notes. Low, slow, almost lullaby-paced. The four notes rose and fell in a pattern I did not at first recognize.
I sat with my hand on Balthazar’s arm and I listened to the four notes. I did not think much of it. I was tired. My heart was still poundin’ a little from the rescue. My head had the light thickness of a woman who had just used up her adrenaline reserve and was now in the low trough that follows. I was not, I thought, in any particular state to be alarmed by a faint melody in a chamber that had been full of strange sounds all afternoon.
But the melody came again. And this time it was not four notes. It was eight notes. A fuller phrase. And the phrase, reader, was one I knew.
I knew it the way you ken a melody that has been in your memory for so long and so deep that you do not ken you know it until you hear it again. It was a melody my mother had sung to me when I was very small. Before my gran. Before the cottage in the Verdant Keep. Before any of the life I remembered consciously. My mother, when I was a wee bairn, had sung me to sleep with a particular lullaby, and I had not heard the lullaby since I was perhaps three years old, and my mother had stopped singin’ it because — because of somethin’ I had not remembered until this moment — because she had told me, once, when I was older and had asked her to sing me to sleep with it, that she could not sing that song any longer, because it was the song that her own mother had sung, and her own mother had been lost when my mother was a girl, and the song had become a song that my mother could no longer bear to sing.
Her own mother. My grandmother. A grandmother I had never known about. A grandmother who, I now realized, in the wee cold startlin’ of this moment, was not my gran — my gran was my father’s mother — was a woman on my mother’s side who had been lost when my mother was young and whom my mother had never spoken of in any of the twenty-six years I had known her.
And the song I was hearin’, comin’ faint and far from somewhere deeper in the ruins, was the song of that lost grandmother. The song my mother had sung me before she had stopped bein’ able to sing it. The song of a woman I had never met, whose name I did not know, whose face I had no image of, and whose existence I had not even consciously remembered until the dreamer’s chamber opened in me the door to the four-note phrase.
I stopped breathin’ for perhaps three seconds.
The song continued. The phrase repeated, softer this time, and then a new phrase took its place — a continuation of the melody that I also knew, that I also had never consciously remembered until that instant, that unfolded itself in my memory as if the full song had been waitin’ in the back of my head for its cue to play, and the cue had come, and now it was playin’, both in the chamber and in my head at the same time.
I felt the pull.
Reader, I will tell ye true: I felt the pull.
The pull was the pull of wantin’ to follow the song. Not to walk toward it in a measured way with my companions. To follow it. Alone. Now. To get up from beside Balthazar, to leave the dais, to find whatever corridor the song was comin’ from, to walk doun that corridor toward the source of the song, and to find — and this was the clearest part of the pullin’, reader, and the part that made me most afraid — to find the woman who was singin’ it. To find my lost grandmother. To find her and to sit at her feet and to listen to her sing the full song that my mother had not been able to sing. To have, for once, the grandmother my mother had never had and that my mother had therefore never been able to give me.
The pull was not a gentle pull. It was not a wonderin’ I-wonder-where-the-song-is-comin’-from sort of pull. It was a strong, steady, slow pull, like the pull of a tide that is comin’ in and that will continue comin’ in regardless of what the pullin’ tide encounters. It was a pull my whole body answered. I felt my legs wantin’ to stand up. I felt my hand wantin’ to release Balthazar’s arm. I felt my breath quickenin’, shallowin’. I felt the scout in me, which I had trusted for thirty-odd years to keep me on my own path, goin’ silent and givin’ way to a younger hungrier self who had always, at some buried level, wanted a grandmother to sing her to sleep.
I did not stand up.
I did not release Balthazar’s arm.
But I was close, reader. I was close to standing up. The closeness lasted perhaps ten seconds of me fightin’ a battle inside my own chest that nobody at the dais could see, and I will tell ye plain that it was the hardest ten seconds of my life up to that point. Harder than the watched mile. Harder than the enchanted wood’s first welcome. Harder than the crossin’ of the first ice-shield, which had taken from me my twenty-six years of gran’s-grief. Harder than even the second ice-shield’s relinquishin’ of my open-hearted-scout’s mask. Because all of those earlier hard moments had been moments where I had been asked to give up or to bear somethin’, and I had been able to see the givin’ up or the bearin’ clearly and had been able to decide, with my whole self, to do it. This moment was different. This moment was a moment where a part of me was bein’ offered somethin’ I had wanted without ken’n I wanted it, and the offerin’ was so generous and so sweet and so exactly pitched to my particular old private bairn-hunger that the offerin’ felt, for a long ten seconds, like the most kindly thing any place in the world had ever said to me.
The song was tender. The song was patient. The song was specifically for me. I ken’d it was specifically for me, because the song was a song nobody else in the chamber had ever heard, because nobody else in the chamber had had my particular mother with my particular lost grandmother and the particular gap in my particular family that the song belonged to. The song was addressed to Ysolde Kerrigan by name, in the only language that could have done so, which was the language of a melody my mother had sung me before I had speech.
And the song was askin’ me to come. To follow. To find.
Reader, I did what ye do when ye are a scout and ye find yourself bein’ pulled by somethin’ ye do not fully understand. I asked my scout what the scout thought.
The scout thought: this is not right.
The scout thought: songs that come from the back of a ruined chamber and that know your private family history and that pull ye toward their source are not songs from lost grandmothers. Lost grandmothers do not, as a general rule, sing from the back rooms of ancient lattice-chambers. Lost grandmothers, if they persist in any form at all, persist as part of the pooled attention of the Silent Witness, and do not have the capacity to be located in a specific corridor of the ruin and sung to a specific descendant.
The scout thought: this is a fragment of somethin’ else. Somethin’ that has read the inside of my head in the moments since I entered this chamber, and has found the most powerful hook in my private memory, and has shaped itself into that hook, and is usin’ the hook to draw me.
The scout thought: this is dangerous.
The scout thought: I must tell the others, and I must tell them now, and I must not go anywhere alone.
But here is where it gets hard, reader. Because at the same moment that the scout was reachin’ these conclusions, the pullin’ was continuin’, and the pullin’ was gettin’ stronger, and the song was gettin’ more tender, and the memory of my mother’s face singin’ it when I was a bairn was gettin’ more vivid, and the memory had in it a sweetness that I had not touched in twenty-three years, and the sweetness was makin’ me want to argue with the scout. The sweetness was whisperin’ to me that the scout was bein’ too cautious, that the scout did not understand, that this was my grandmother and I had a right to go to her, and it was only a corridor or two, and the others would forgive me, and I would come back after I had met her, and everything would be the better for the meetin’.
The sweetness was very persuasive, reader. It was so persuasive that I want to be honest and say that if I had been alone in the chamber, I might have followed the song. I might have stood up, and left the dais, and walked into the corridor, and been lost.
But I was not alone. I had four companions at the dais. I had their weight around me. I had my hand on Balthazar’s arm, which was a physical anchor to one of the four. I had the rope still tied round Balthazar’s waist from the floor-crossin’, the other end still in Seraphine’s grip at the dais’s edge, which meant that if I stood up abruptly and began to walk away, somebody might notice. I had Tobin standin’ three paces off, and Tobin had eyes like an owl’s in dim light, and Tobin would see me stand up.
The scout told me: stay sittin’. Speak first. Speak now. Tell them what ye hear.
I opened my mouth to speak.
But here is where the song did its worst, reader. Because the moment I opened my mouth, the song changed. It shifted key, by a half-step, and it introduced a new phrase I had never heard before, and the new phrase was — and I do not know how to tell ye this, reader, except plain — the new phrase was my mother’s voice sayin’ my name. Not singin’. Sayin’. The way my mother used to say my name in the mornin’s, when she was wakin’ me for chores, in the soft sing-song that was halfway between a call and a melody. The song had, in the brief seconds of my openin’ my mouth to speak, reached into my memory again and found my mother’s wakin’-voice and had woven it into the melody.
It was, reader, dirty fightin’. The song — or the thing behind the song — was respondin’ to my scout’s resistance by upping the stakes of the hook. My lost grandmother was not enough. Now it was my lost grandmother plus my livin’ mother’s voice wakin’ me for chores. Now it was both sides of my maternal line braided into a single pull.
I will tell ye honest: I cried. Not loud sobbin’. A wee helpless hot tear that came out of my left eye without my permission and ran doun my cheek, and I did not wipe it, because wipin’ it would have required me to take my hand off Balthazar’s arm, and I was not takin’ my hand off Balthazar’s arm.
Balthazar, beside me, said in his quiet ordinary voice, “Ysolde.”
He had felt me cryin’ through the hand on his arm. He had not looked at me. He was facin’ the artifact, because his own business was with the dais. But he had felt me. And he had spoken my name in the particular way a good mate says the name of another mate who is in trouble, which is not a question and not a statement but a simple ackowledgment: I am here, I see, tell me.
I turned my head toward him. I kept my voice low, because the song was still playin’ in the background of the chamber and I did not want to disturb whatever arrangements Aldric was makin’ at the front of the dais.
I said, “Balthazar. There’s a song. Comin’ from the back of the chamber. It’s callin’ me. I need to tell everyone. Help me tell them.”
Balthazar did not ask what I meant. He did not ask whether I was hearin’ things. He simply turned his head and said, in his ordinary voice but with enough volume to carry to the others, “Party. Ysolde has somethin’ to tell ye. Please stop what ye’re doin’ for a minute.”
Aldric looked up from his tome. Tobin turned at once. Seraphine, at the rope, tightened her grip on it and turned her attention fully to me.
I took a breath. The song was still comin’. The pullin’ was still on me. I did not have time to pretty this up. I spoke plain.
“Friends. I hear a song. It’s comin’ from the back of the chamber, past the dais, from some corridor or passage we havena explored. I canna tell ye where it is exactly. It’s very faint. It’s a song my mother used to sing to me when I was a bairn. It’s a song that belonged to my mother’s mother, who was lost before my mother grew up. Nobody else in the world knows this song but me and my mother, so far as I ken. And the song is pullin’ me to follow it, reader — I mean, Tobin — and the pull is very strong. And a minute ago the song changed to include my mother’s wakin’-voice from my childhood, which is a voice nobody could produce on their own without havin’ been inside my head. So the song has been inside my head. Somethin’ has been inside my head. And I am tellin’ ye now because I ken if I stand up in the next few minutes and start to walk toward the back of the chamber, ye must not let me. Ye must not let me go. Do ye hear?”
I did not mean to make a speech of it. The words came out a wee bit faster and thicker than I had intended. But the four of them understood.
Tobin’s face went grave at once. Not alarmed. Grave. He said, “Ysolde. Thank ye for speakin’. How long have ye been hearin’ it?”
“Perhaps two minutes. Maybe three. It started as four notes. Then eight. Then the full song with my mother’s voice in it now.”
“Do any of the rest of us hear it?”
Everyone listened. Aldric closed his eyes briefly. Seraphine tilted her head. Balthazar’s face was already facing that direction. Tobin stood very still.
“I hear nothing,” said Aldric.
“I hear nothing,” said Seraphine.
“I hear nothing,” said Balthazar. “Balthazar hears only the ordinary hum of the artifact and the faint chorus of the listenin’-hall behind us.”
“Nor I,” said Tobin. “The song is directed at ye alone, lass. That is consistent with my understandin’ of what is happenin’.”
“And what is happenin’?” I asked.
Tobin sat down beside me on the dais, so that he and Balthazar were both on my side. He said, quietly:
“Ysolde. What you are hearin’ is not the dreamer. The dreamer speaks through the artifact, openly, to all of us at once. What you are hearin’ is somethin’ else. There are, in any binding of this age and scale, what the old scholars called drift-voices. They are fragments of the bound consciousness that have, over the long millennia of the binding, come loose from the main field of the Silent Witness’s pooled attention and have driftet into the corners of the ruin. They are not the dreamer. They are the broken bits. They are not evil, exactly — they are not agents of malice — but they are hungry. They are hungry because they are no longer connected to the main pool, and they have no way of receivin’ new attention except by drawin’ it from livin’ visitors. And they are crafty, because they are made of the same contributor-minds as the main pool, and those minds were clever.
“A drift-voice finds a livin’ visitor. It reads the visitor’s interior. It finds the visitor’s deepest particular hunger — a lost grandmother, an unsung song, a mother’s waking-voice. And it sings that hunger back to the visitor, in order to lure the visitor to follow it away from the main group and into some corner of the ruin where the drift-voice can draw on the visitor’s attention without bein’ interrupted. The drawin’ does not kill the visitor. But the drawin’ makes the visitor, over time, lose the ability to leave. The visitor stays in the corner, listenin’ to the song, feedin’ the drift-voice with her attention, until she starves, or dies of thirst, or is found by somebody who knows to break the spell.
“I have seen this before, lass. On my second Vale. One of my companions — a woman who had lost a lover to the war — heard her lost lover’s voice callin’ her from a side-chamber, and she followed it, and we did not find her for three days, and when we found her she was sittin’ with her back against a wall in a dark room and her eyes were open but she was not respondin’, and we carried her out, and it took her six months to come back to herself, and she was never quite the same woman after.
“That is what is happenin’ to ye now, Ysolde. A drift-voice has found your mother’s side of your family, and is usin’ the song. The song will continue to get more persuasive the longer ye listen. It may add your mother’s voice for a while, then your grandmother’s voice, then other voices of your lost kin that ye did not ken ye had. Each addition is calibrated to increase the pull. The drift-voice has a whole library of ye to draw from, because ye have been inside this chamber and the chamber is in contact with the main pool and the main pool has been readin’ ye since ye entered.
“What we do, lass, is we do not let ye go. And we help ye resist the pull. And after a while — perhaps an hour, perhaps less if we are lucky, perhaps more if the drift-voice is particularly hungry — the drift-voice will give up on ye and will retreat to wait for another visitor. The drift-voice cannot force ye. It can only tempt. If we hold ye here and ye hold yourself here, the temptin’ will pass.”
I listened to all of this. I listened, reader, with the part of me that was still the scout, and the scout agreed with every word. The song’s behavior matched Tobin’s description exactly. The drift-voice was readin’ me. The drift-voice was calibratin’. The drift-voice had added my mother’s wakin’-voice because my resistance had increased when I had decided to speak, and it had upped its game in response.
And knowin’ all of this — havin’ heard Tobin’s full plain explanation of the mechanism — did not make the pull stop.
That is the thing I want ye to understand, reader. The knowin’ did not make the pull stop. The pull continued. The song continued. The sweetness continued. I was now equipped with a full accurate understandin’ of what the song was and how it worked and what it wanted from me, and the understandin’ was enormously useful, but it did not extinguish the pull. It merely let me carry the pull with open eyes rather than with closed ones.
I said, softly, “Tobin. Knowin’ what it is doesn’t make it stop.”
“I know, lass.”
“It’s still pullin’ me.”
“I know. It will keep pullin’ ye. For a while. That is why we stay here together.”
Seraphine, who had been considerin’ during Tobin’s explanation, said, “Master Whittlehouse. Is there anything we can do to help Ysolde resist, beyond simply remaining together?”
“Aye, Seraphine. There are a few things. First: Ysolde, ye must not look toward the back of the chamber. The song is audio-based, but drift-voices often pair themselves with visual cues — a flicker of shadow, a suggestion of movement. If ye look, the visual will reinforce the audio. Keep your eyes on us, or on the artifact, or on the floor. Second: we should speak to ye continuously. The drift-voice’s pull weakens when the livin’ visitor’s attention is occupied by livin’ voices. Third: physical contact helps. Balthazar’s hand on your arm is already helpin’. Any of us could add to that. Fourth: the braided circlet Pell gave ye, at your breast — can ye touch it?”
“Aye,” I said. I reached into my inner pouch with my free hand and drew out the circlet. It was warm — warmer than it had been since we had entered the descent. Much warmer. I closed my fingers around it.
“Good. The wood’s attention, through the circlet, is a different kind of attention than the drift-voice. It is livin’ attention rather than hungry attention. Hold the circlet. The wood is with ye. Ye are not alone.”
The circlet was hot in my hand. Not burning. Hot like a small hearth-coal that has been in the fire for a long time and is now warm through. I could feel Pell’s woven grass against my palm. I could feel, through the warmth, the wee flickering pulse I had felt at the rim of the Vale — the pulse that had told me the wood was still leanin’ out its window watching. The pulse was now a steady continuous pressure, stronger than a flicker. The wood was not leanin’ out the window. The wood was pressin’ its palm against the glass. The wood was with me.
I held the circlet harder.
The song continued. But with the circlet’s warmth in my left hand and Balthazar’s arm in my right hand and Tobin’s shoulder against mine and Seraphine’s voice beginnin’ now to speak — she was speakin’ softly, in her low continental murmur, sayin’ “Ysolde, the stew last night at the hollow, the stew that tasted of your gran’s kitchen, do you remember how we each spoke of what the scent brought to us, do you remember the particular pitch of Balthazar’s voice when he said the name Sister Clemence — ” — and Aldric joining her — “Ysolde, the silver-wire bird at the edge of the enchanted wood, do you remember the phrase it sang, will you whistle it for me now, not to the dreamer, just to me, so that I may hear it again — ” — with all of these livin’ voices addressin’ me continuously, the pull began to distribute.
It did not stop. The song was still comin’. The sweetness was still there. But the pull was no longer the whole of my attention. It was one stream among several. My mother’s wakin’-voice was still in the song, but so was Balthazar’s ordinary-voice sayin’ my name, and so was Seraphine’s murmur describin’ last night’s stew, and so was Aldric’s request to hear the silver-wire bird’s phrase, and so was Tobin’s steady grandfatherly breathin’ beside me, and so was the hot pulse of the circlet in my palm. The livin’ attention of four souls and one greenwood against the hungry attention of one drift-voice.
It was not an even match. I will tell ye, reader, the drift-voice was patient and sophisticated and very specifically calibrated, and the livin’ attention was improvised and variable and not nearly as precisely pitched. The drift-voice had every advantage of craft. But the livin’ attention had one advantage the drift-voice could not match, which was that it was livin’. The drift-voice, for all its cunning, was a fragment. It was not whole. It could lure, but it could not hold against the actual continuous presence of livin’ souls whose attention was freely given.
I whistled, for Aldric, the silver-wire bird’s phrase. I whistled it with my free lips because my two hands were occupied. I whistled the three rising notes, the pause, the five descending notes, the longer pause, the two held tones a fifth apart. My whistle was rough at first because my mouth was tired and I was cryin’, but by the second repetition it was steady.
And as I whistled the phrase, I felt somethin’ happen. The circlet in my left hand pulsed. Once. Hard. As if the greenwood had heard the whistle through whatever connection Pell had woven into the circlet, and had sent back a brief strong acknowledgment.
And the drift-voice’s song — reader, I am tellin’ ye what happened — the drift-voice’s song faltered. Just for a moment. Just for perhaps a second and a half. The melody wavered, the way a tune wavers when a singer has lost the thread and is tryin’ to recover it. The sweetness thinned. The pull weakened by a noticeable fraction.
The drift-voice had not expected the silver-wire bird’s phrase. The drift-voice had read my interior for family-hungers and had not thought to read for wood-memories. The whistle had been, in its small way, a counter-song — a song the drift-voice did not have in its library, and therefore could not shape itself around.
I whistled the phrase a third time. The circlet pulsed again. The drift-voice’s song faltered again. I kept whistlin’. The others kept speakin’ around me. Balthazar, bless him, had begun to hum, under his breath — the Kyrie he had hummed in the descent, the simple rural Kyrie of the cathedral kitchen. Seraphine was still describing the stew. Aldric had moved on to describin’ the seven-mirrors puzzle, step by step, and askin’ me if I remembered the third mirror’s matching, which he knew I did because we had discussed it afterward. Tobin was reciting, in a low steady voice, the names of various horses he had kenned in his longer-than-he-admitted life, and I did not ken why he was recitin’ horse-names until I understood, after perhaps thirty seconds, that he was recitin’ the names of horses he remembered Ysoldes of various previous acquaintances had owned, which was a scholar’s-counter-attention aimed at my particular interest. The old man was clever. The old man was very clever.
Between the four of them, they had arranged a livin’ chorus specifically designed to pull my attention back in four directions simultaneously. The drift-voice’s song could not maintain its coherence against this. The song continued, but it was no longer continuous; it was now arriving in broken phrases, with gaps where the drift-voice was tryin’ to recalibrate against each new counter-attention my companions had introduced, and failing because my companions were livin’ and could introduce new variations faster than the drift-voice could read and shape.
The pull was weakening. Not gone. But weakening.
I stopped whistlin’. I drew a deep breath. I said, in a voice that was steadier than it had been five minutes earlier:
“Tobin. Friends. Thank ye. It’s easin’. I can feel it easin’.”
“Good, lass. Stay where ye are. Stay with us.”
“How long until it passes?”
“The drift-voice cannot maintain its pull against a well-coordinated party for more than a quarter of an hour at most. We are perhaps eight minutes in. Another seven and it will give up.”
“Seven more minutes.”
“Aye. Hold. Ye’re doin’ well.”
I held. Seven more minutes is a long time when a thing is pullin’ ye from the inside, reader, but I ken’d what seven more minutes looked like when the seven minutes was shared with four souls who were each doin’ their specific work. I held. The circlet was hot. The Kyrie was low and steady. Seraphine’s murmur was soft and precise. Aldric’s quiz on the puzzle was increasingly elaborate — he was now askin’ me about the interaction with the fourth mirror and whether the toast had been warm or room-temperature when it transmuted, which was a question I had to actually think about to answer, and the thinkin’ kept my mind occupied. Tobin’s horse-names had moved from recollection to invention — he was now namin’ horses that had not existed, elaborate fictional horses whose names he was describin’ with absurd genealogies, and the absurdity made me laugh, and the laughing broke more of the drift-voice’s grip than any other single thing had done.
“Tobin,” I said, laughing, “there’s no such horse as Moonfleet-Champion-of-the-Three-Winds-Grandson-of-Ironshod-the-Lame.”
“There was, lass, and Moonfleet-Champion won the 437th annual Festival-of-the-Three-Rivers invitational trot by a half-length, and was sired by Ironshod-the-Lame out of a mare named Silk-of-Thursday, though her proper pedigree name was Silkthursday-of-the-Lower-Paddock-Daughter-of-Honeyrain. All horses of that province had proper pedigree names of considerable length, you understand.”
“Tobin, ye’re fabricatin’ a whole equine tradition.”
“I am, lass. I shall continue until the drift-voice has left ye entirely. Another horse. Her name was Brightness-of-the-Fifth-Day-Who-Did-Not-Like-Apples. An unusual horse, in that she did not like apples, which was commented upon throughout her racing career. She was sired by — ”
And so on. I laughed, and I laughed more, and Aldric began to laugh, and Balthazar’s Kyrie broke off into the chest-cough he used for laughter, and Seraphine, of all of them, let out a soft ripple of genuine surprised amusement when Tobin invented a mare who, he claimed, had been deeded to the parish church of a village that had not existed in exchange for a theological ruling on whether horses were permitted to enter heaven.
By the time Tobin had described four more fictional horses, each with a more absurd pedigree and a more implausible feat of horsemanship, I realized that the song had stopped. I did not know when exactly it had stopped. Somewhere during the laughter, the drift-voice had given up and had withdrawn. The pull was no longer present. The hot circlet in my hand cooled by slow degrees back to a warm steady presence, the wood acknowledging that the crisis had passed.
I drew a deep long breath. I let it out. I said, quietly, “It’s gone.”
“Aye,” said Tobin. “Ye did well, lass. Ye told us in time. Ye held against the pull. Ye’re all right.”
“I am all right.”
“Do ye need a minute before we continue with Aldric’s speakin’?”
“I need about four minutes, Tobin. Maybe five. My hands are shakin’.”
“Take all the minutes ye need. The dreamer is patient. The dreamer has been waitin’ eight thousand years. Four more minutes will not offend it.”
We sat. I released Balthazar’s arm, finally — my hand had been cramped around his forearm for what had felt like an hour, and when I released him he shook his wrist to bring back circulation without complainin’. I wiped my eyes. I put the circlet back into my pouch, where it continued to pulse gently against my breastbone in the rhythm of the wood’s steady distant attention.
Ysolde-I, for this was still Ysolde Kerrigan sittin’ on the dais, permitted herself to feel, in this minute of rest, the full weight of what had nearly happened. I had, for a span of perhaps twelve minutes, been inside a hunger that was not my own and that had been specifically designed to separate me from my party. The hunger had been tender. The hunger had been kind. The hunger had called me by the most intimate names I possessed. And the hunger had, if I had not spoken, won. I would have stood up, and walked away, and been found three days later sittin’ in a dark room with my eyes open, and my companions would have carried me out, and I would have taken six months to come back to myself, if I came back at all.
But I had spoken. I had spoken because Balthazar had said my name when he felt me cry. I had spoken because I had four souls around me whose attention was available when I needed it. I had spoken because I had learned, on this journey, that my first duty to my party was to speak when a thing was happenin’ to me that they needed to ken about, and that the speakin’ of it did not diminish me but strengthened me. I had learned this at the Copper Kettle, and in the masqued inn, and at Aldric’s reading of the chapter, and at Tobin’s parable, and at Pell’s cottage, and at Balthazar’s meditation on canopies, and at the stew-meal before the ruins, and at the first ice-shield. I had had the whole journey as a long curriculum in when to speak and how to speak, and the curriculum had prepared me for this twelve minutes.
The Verdant Keep, back home in my country of hedgerows and diligent parishes, had a sayin’ that my gran had often used: a fire is not put out by one hand, but it is not kindled by one either. I understood, sittin’ on the dais with the circlet cooling at my breast and the four of my companions arranged around me in their separate watchin’s, that the drift-voice had not been put out by one hand. It had been put out by five — four livin’ souls and one living wood — and that no single one of the five could have put it out alone. Not even Tobin, with his two prior Vales and his old understandin’ of drift-voices, could have put it out alone if he had been the only one with me; the drift-voice would have calibrated against him too, and the counter-attention of one man against a well-read hunger was not enough.
It had taken the whole of the party.
This, reader, is the thing about a party. A party is not four skilled specialists who happen to share a campfire. A party is the combined livin’ attention of five souls, each of whom has their own particular way of payin’ attention to a thing, and whose combined attentions can defend any one member against a calibrated attack that would defeat any one of them alone. I had always understood this abstractly. I understood it now concretely. I had been the one defended, today. In some future twelve minutes, I would be one of the defenders. That was the arrangement. That was the party.
I stood up, at last, a wee bit shakily. Tobin stood with me. Balthazar stood more slowly, still recoverin’ his own legs from the floor-crossing. Seraphine and Aldric had already risen.
“Ready, lass?” asked Tobin.
“Ready, Tobin.”
“Aldric, whenever you are prepared.”
Aldric looked at me. He said, quietly, “Ysolde. Before I begin, I want to say one thing.”
“Say it, Brother.”
“The silver-wire bird’s phrase you whistled — you heard the drift-voice falter when you whistled it. I want the record to show that the woodland’s countercharm, through your own whistle, did at least half the work of breaking the drift-voice’s hold. It was not only our speaking. It was your own voice, returning to the greenwood, that did it.”
“Thank ye, Aldric.”
“You saved yourself, Ysolde. We helped. But you were the one who spoke first, and you were the one who whistled. Remember that.”
I looked at him. I could not at once formulate a response. I settled for nodding, once. He nodded back.
Aldric walked to the front of the dais. He opened his tome. He stood for a moment with his hand on the page, and then he lifted his face toward the artifact, and he began to speak to the Silent Witness.
But that, reader, is his segment to tell. I will end mine here, with my feet steady again on the dais’s pale stone and my hand still faintly warm from the circlet and my whole self acquainted, now, with the kind of danger I had not ken’d existed — the danger of bein’ offered, by somethin’ that is not your friend, the exact thing your heart has most wanted and has never admitted to wantin’. I shall carry the knowin’ of that danger with me the rest of my life. It is a useful knowin’. I shall not be fooled by it again.
The song is gone. The chamber is quiet. Aldric is speakin’. The dreamer is listenin’. The party stands together at the dais, five souls and four livin’ wills and one living wood in the pouch at my breast. I am Ysolde Kerrigan. I was very nearly lost today. I was found by the speakin’ of my own mouth and the answerin’ of my companions’ mouths, and I will, for the rest of whatever days I am given, speak when a thing is happenin’ that my party needs to ken about, and I will trust the party to answer, as they have answered today, with all the particular specific attentions that make this particular specific party the one I have been lookin’ for all my life without ken’n I was lookin’.
The circlet cools against my breastbone. The wood leans back from the window, its work for this hour complete. Aldric’s voice rises. The dreamer’s violet light deepens. The real work begins.
I am Ysolde. I am here. I am stayin’ here. Thank ye, friends. Thank ye, old mother greenwood. Thank ye, party.
The song that should not be heard will not be heard again.
Segment 21: The Watcher Behind the Mask
It occurred, she understood later with the precision that always returned to her after the fact of any considerable event, in the small interval between two ordinary observations she had made during the approach to the dais — between her first look at the broken statues lining the chamber’s perimeter and her second look perhaps ninety seconds later — and the interval had been otherwise unremarkable, filled with the minor housekeeping of a party preparing for a consequential address, Aldric fidgeting with the clasp of his tome, Tobin adjusting his stance on the dais’s pale stone, Balthazar easing his weight from his left knee to his right in the small movements of a man whose legs had not yet fully forgiven him for the minute of the rescue, Ysolde drawing one deep composed breath after another as she recovered from the drift-voice’s retreat, and she herself completing the slow professional perimeter-scan that she had been performing continuously since entering the lattice-chamber’s antechamber and that she now extended, at the dais, to include the further reaches of the main chamber’s outer edges, in particular the shadowed alcoves behind the columns where the chamber’s ambient violet light did not quite penetrate and where, it had been apparent from her first scan, some dozen or so pale-stone statues stood in attitudes of various postures along the chamber’s circumference — and it was in the second pass of this scan, her attention idly lingering on the third statue from the left along the chamber’s far wall, that she registered the discrepancy.
The statue had moved.
She did not at first allow herself the full formulation of the observation, because a trained operative did not allow herself full formulations of alarming observations until she had confirmed the observation through at least two independent channels, and she now needed perhaps fifteen seconds to perform the confirmation, which she conducted as follows.
First, she completed her current scan without showing any change in her posture, breath, or facial expression. This was the hardest of the three confirmations, because the body’s natural response to the registration of a moving statue in one’s peripheral vision was to stiffen, to turn the head for a direct look, to produce some small audible intake of breath — each of which would have communicated to the moving statue, if the moving statue was indeed what she now suspected it might be, that she had detected the movement, and would therefore forfeit the tactical advantage her silence could purchase. She did not stiffen. She did not turn her head. She did not breathe differently. She finished her perimeter-scan in the ordinary pacing of any perimeter-scan she had ever conducted, which was a pacing her body could reproduce without conscious effort because it had performed the action perhaps five thousand times.
Second, she allowed her attention — not her eyes, but her interior attention — to return to the memory of the first pass she had made perhaps ninety seconds earlier, and to compare that memory against the current position of the third statue from the left. On the first pass, the third statue had been oriented with its face angled approximately thirty degrees to the east of the dais, its left arm raised in a gesture of benediction or address, its right hand resting at its hip. On the current pass, the third statue was oriented with its face angled approximately ten degrees to the east of the dais — which is to say, its face had turned some twenty degrees toward the party at the dais — and its left arm was lower by perhaps four degrees, and its right hand had shifted from the hip to somewhere closer to the waist. These were not large movements. These were, precisely, the movements a watcher would make over ninety seconds if the watcher was attending to the subjects of its watching and wished to maintain visual acquisition of them without making conspicuous motions. A slow turn of the head. A slight lowering of a raised arm so it was less visible against the contrasting wall. A shift of the hand into a position of greater readiness. Small adjustments, consistent with continuous observation, masked within the general stillness of a statue.
Third, she required an independent confirmation of the discrepancy, because no single observer’s memory of a ninety-second-previous glance was trustworthy enough to support the conclusion on its own. She performed the independent confirmation by a technique she had learned during her apprenticeship, which was to close her eyes briefly — for perhaps two seconds, long enough to break the ocular connection but not long enough to alarm any observers who might be watching her — and then to reopen them at a slightly different angle than her previous scan had used, and to note, in the reopening, whether the statue’s position registered as exactly identical to the memory she was holding. It did not. At the reopening, the statue had shifted by another degree or two. The shift was not the shift that static stone produces as a function of the observer’s movement; static stone does not change its orientation relative to its own base, and this statue had.
The observation was confirmed.
She had, at this point, approximately four seconds during which she needed to decide what to do and how to do it, because the continued silence of her companions and the beginning of Aldric’s address to the Silent Witness were imminent, and she needed either to interrupt the address now with an alarm or to proceed with the address while managing the watcher on her own authority. She considered, in the four seconds, the case for each option.
The case for interrupting: the watcher was an unknown presence in a chamber where the party’s attention was about to be fully occupied by the conversation with the dreamer. If the watcher was hostile, and if the watcher intended to act during the distraction of the address, the party needed to be warned now and needed to adopt a defensive configuration before the address began. Interrupting was the cautious choice.
The case for not interrupting: the address to the Silent Witness was the hinge of the entire journey, and its delay even by a minute might produce unknown consequences in the register of the conversation with the dreamer. The dreamer had been waiting eight thousand years for this address. The dreamer had, presumably, arranged many details of the chamber’s preparation for the address, and might or might not take offense at an operative’s interruption of the moment for a security concern the dreamer had either already assessed or was in a position to address itself. Moreover — and this was the tactical consideration that determined her decision — if the watcher was hostile and had the capacity to read her interior, her interruption would signal to the watcher that its concealment had been detected, and the watcher might then abandon concealment in favor of active engagement, which would occur at a moment of the watcher’s choosing rather than at a moment of the party’s. Silence maintained her information advantage. Silence preserved the possibility that she could engage the watcher at a moment she controlled. Silence also permitted the address to the Silent Witness to proceed unimpeded, which was the party’s primary objective.
She decided, in the third of the four seconds, to maintain silence and to manage the watcher herself, through the continuous reinforcement of the silent test she was about to conduct, while the address proceeded.
In the fourth of the four seconds, she composed the silent test she would run.
The silent test had three phases, and she executed each phase with the efficient internal cuing she had developed across her professional life.
Phase one: further confirmation that the statue was a hostile watcher, as opposed to some neutral phenomenon of the chamber — a mobile piece of dreamer-adjacent machinery, an animate element of the architecture, a benign guardian whose function did not include threat. She needed to establish hostility, or at least specific attentiveness to her own party, before deciding whether to escalate her management.
Phase two: identification of the watcher’s nature. Was it one of the drift-voices Tobin had described, wearing physical form instead of auditory? Was it an external intruder — perhaps a further agent of the Silent Chapter of the Lattice, having somehow reached this chamber ahead of their party? Was it something she had not yet been told to expect? The phase two identification would determine how she dealt with it in phase three.
Phase three: management. Either containment, if the watcher could be contained without alarm; or controlled escalation, if the watcher required the party’s full attention.
She began phase one.
She had, during the ninety-second interval in which the watcher had turned its face toward the party, already gathered the first datum of phase one: the movement was directed at the party specifically rather than being a random disturbance of the chamber. This was significant but not conclusive. To confirm specific hostility, she needed to test whether the watcher’s attention tracked her personally or whether it was diffusely attending to the group.
She conducted this test by means of a small deliberate action that would not be remarked upon by any ordinary observer but that would register distinctly to any attention aimed specifically at her. She shifted her weight on the dais from her left foot to her right, slowly, over perhaps three seconds. This was a natural motion of a woman who had been standing for some minutes and was adjusting her stance for comfort. It was not unusual. Tobin, standing nearby, did not glance at her. Neither did Aldric or Balthazar or Ysolde. The motion was visible but ordinary. She then, on a count of five within her own interior cadence, began to shift her weight back to her left foot.
She did not complete the second shift. She held the partial shift — her weight now distributed approximately sixty percent right, forty percent left — for a further five seconds, and she used those five seconds to glance, without turning her head, at the third statue from the left along the far wall.
The statue had completed an answering motion. It had leaned very slightly to its own right — to match the direction of her weight shift. The lean was small, perhaps one degree, no more. But the lean was present. The lean was specific. The lean corresponded to her own action in a way that confirmed the watcher was tracking her personally, reading her body, and adjusting its own body in response.
She had her first datum. The watcher was specifically attending to her.
This did not yet confirm hostility. A benign guardian might also track the party’s members for purposes of courteous observation. She needed a second datum: whether the watcher’s attention was attempting to conceal itself. A benign guardian would not conceal. A hostile watcher would. The fact that the statue had moved only between her glances rather than openly was suggestive of concealment, but the concealment-behavior needed to be confirmed deliberately.
She tested concealment by the following method. She turned her head, very slowly, toward the third statue. She did not stare at it; she merely included it in a broad scan that moved her gaze across a forty-degree arc including the far wall. She let her eyes pass over the statue for perhaps two seconds, as though noting its presence without particular interest. She then continued the scan past it. She held her head at the new angle for ten seconds. During those ten seconds, the statue did not move. It remained in its new position, perfectly still, in the posture it had been occupying when her direct gaze had fallen upon it.
Then she looked away. She returned her gaze to the dais. She continued her scan of the perimeter in the ordinary pattern. She let forty seconds pass.
At the forty-second mark, she glanced back.
The statue had moved again. Two more degrees of facial angle. A slight further lowering of the left arm. It had used the forty-second window in which she was not directly observing it to continue adjusting its position toward a better line of sight on the party.
Concealment confirmed. The watcher was modifying its behavior based on whether it was being observed. Benign guardians did not modify their behavior for observation; benign guardians either remained still regardless or moved openly regardless. Only a hostile or a deceptive watcher modifies its observable behavior to match the observer’s attention.
She had her second datum. The watcher was hostile, or at the minimum, deceptive.
Phase one concluded. She moved to phase two.
For phase two — identification of the watcher’s nature — she needed to examine the statue directly without alerting the watcher to the examination. She could not stare at it. But she could examine its image in a reflection, and she had, on her person, an object she had often used for this purpose: the small dark glass vial Pell had given her at the edge of his grove on the morning of their departure, stoppered with silver wire, and which she had been carrying in the inner pocket of her cloak ever since. The outside of the vial’s glass was polished to a high mirror finish. At close range, the vial functioned as a small hand-mirror.
She reached into her inner pocket and drew out the vial. She held it in her right palm with the stoppered end upward, as though examining it for some reason of her own — perhaps considering whether to administer its contents at some moment during the address. She angled the vial in her palm such that its polished outer surface caught the reflection of the far wall, and within that reflection, at a sharp angle, the third statue from the left. The vial gave her a tiny but distinct image of the watcher, and because she was looking at her own palm rather than at the statue, the watcher, if it was reading her gaze, would not perceive her as observing it.
She studied the reflection.
The statue was, in the reflection, no longer quite a statue. Or rather — and this was the observation that produced the first real quickening of her professional dread beneath her composed exterior — the statue was a statue of a form she had not seen on her first scan. It was not the same statue she had initially noted. The first scan had shown a statue of indeterminate general form, approximately human-shaped, with a raised arm in benediction-posture, a weathered pale-stone face of conventional civic sculpture, a body robed in long carved folds of fabric. The reflection now showed a statue whose face had resolved into a more specific visage than the generic visage it had presented during her first scan.
The face was hers.
She did not at first permit herself the registration of this observation, because the registration was of a magnitude that her composed interior might not be able to contain in its current operational register, and she needed to retain operational composure. She redirected her attention, for three seconds, away from the face in the reflection and toward the ordinary business of checking the vial’s stopper, as though her examination had been entirely about the vial. Three seconds of redirection. She then returned to the reflection.
The face was still hers. The face was not her face as she wore it now — it was not the carefully composed face she presented to the party at the dais. It was her face as it had appeared perhaps fifteen years ago, at an age and posture she had not worn since her late twenties, with a softer jaw and an expression she had not shown anyone for many years. The statue had, somehow, in the interval of the ninety seconds since her first scan, taken on her own earlier face. It was wearing her face as a mask.
She held the vial. She kept her palm steady. She kept her breath steady. She let perhaps five seconds pass.
The statue, in the reflection, smiled.
It smiled with her own fifteen-years-ago mouth, and the smile was not a menacing smile, and it was not a pleasant smile either; it was, specifically, the particular small half-smile she had worn during her Valmontois court years when she had identified a target she intended to outmaneuver. It was her operating smile. It was a smile she had not worn in public in twenty years. It was a smile she had, for most of her adult life, considered her private working expression — a signature of her interior method, not for general viewing.
The watcher was wearing her own operating smile back at her.
She closed her hand around the vial, slowly, without changing her posture or her breathing. She returned the vial to her inner pocket. She did not react externally. Her companions, beside her on the dais, had not noticed anything. Aldric had just cleared his throat and was beginning his address. His voice was steady and scholarly and addressed to the artifact on the pedestal. Tobin stood with his eyes half-closed in the attitude of listening. Balthazar was seated, recovering. Ysolde was beside Balthazar with her hand on his shoulder and her eyes on the artifact. None of them had glanced toward the far wall in the past several minutes.
She, Seraphine, now understood the nature of the watcher.
The watcher was, she judged with the professional cold of a complete identification, a specific kind of hostile entity that she had encountered only once before in her career, in a very different context — a context she did not wish to name even to herself, because the naming would have required her to revisit an engagement from her Valmontois years that she had survived but had not enjoyed. The entity was what the old operational lexicon of her trade had called a mirror-watcher. A mirror-watcher was a creature, of whatever origin, that could read a subject’s interior and take on the subject’s own face — specifically, the version of the subject’s face that the subject most associated with their own moments of greatest effectiveness, which was to say, the face the subject wore when they were most themselves at their most dangerous. The mirror-watcher would then deploy that face as a weapon against the subject. The deployment worked by inducing in the subject a particular cognitive disturbance: the subject, confronted with a version of themselves at their most operationally effective, would either lose composure (seeing themselves as an adversary) or overcorrect into false confidence (seeing themselves as an ally), and either response would compromise the subject’s effectiveness. The mirror-watcher did not have to fight. The mirror-watcher merely had to appear. The appearance did the work.
She had encountered a mirror-watcher once before, in a context she did not name, and had survived the encounter by the simple discipline of refusing to engage with the mirrored face. She had not looked at it. She had not spoken to it. She had gone about her operational business with the mirror-watcher present in the room but not attended to, and the mirror-watcher, after perhaps an hour of failing to elicit a response, had moved on. The discipline had been taxing but not impossible, and it had served.
But that encounter had been years ago, and she had been, at that time, younger, more hardened, and more entirely committed to the operational mask. She had been the Thrice-Masked in full, and the face the mirror-watcher had shown her then had not produced a crisis, because her relationship with that face had been clean — she had worn the face, had used the face, and had not questioned the face.
Today, in this chamber, the mirror-watcher was showing her a face she had, less than an hour earlier, relinquished at the second ice-shield. She had entered the chamber as Amelie’s granddaughter, not as the Thrice-Masked. She had set down the operating face. The mirror-watcher, reading her interior with the calibrated precision that was its nature, had picked up the very face she had just put down and was now wearing it back at her.
This was a deliberate attack. It was a specific, calibrated, and sophisticated attack. The mirror-watcher had chosen, with its reading of her interior, to present her with the image of her own recent relinquishment. It was asking her, through the mirror, whether her relinquishment was real. Whether she could see her own operating face in the hands of an enemy and still remain Amelie’s granddaughter. Whether the mask she had set down at the threshold was, in fact, set down, or whether it would leap back onto her face the moment an adversary wore it.
This was the test. This was why the chamber had the watcher.
She understood, in the moment of full identification, that the mirror-watcher was not an intruder from the Silent Chapter or any other rival organization. The mirror-watcher was part of the dreamer’s own arrangements. The dreamer had, with the second ice-shield’s consent-protocol, accepted her relinquishment of the masks at the threshold — but acceptance at a threshold was not the same as confirmation in the chamber. The dreamer required a confirmation. The dreamer’s mechanism for confirmation was the mirror-watcher. It presented the relinquishing party with the image of the relinquished mask in the wearing of an other, and observed whether the party reclaimed the mask or remained in the relinquished state.
This was the dreamer’s test of her.
She understood, in the next thought, that each member of the party would be tested in some corresponding way, by some corresponding mechanism. Ysolde had already been tested by the drift-voice, which had offered her the lost grandmother and the mother’s wakin’-voice. Ysolde had passed the test. The test had been calibrated to Ysolde’s particular interior. Her own test, Seraphine’s, was similarly calibrated. The mirror-watcher in the third statue was her personal test. She did not know whether Aldric, Balthazar, and Tobin would also face personalized tests, or whether their tests had already occurred in the crossings of the ice-shields. She suspected the dreamer had arranged something for each of them, and that some of the tests had been passed already and some were yet to come.
Her own test was now.
She considered, for perhaps three further seconds, whether to alert the others. The considerations were similar to the considerations she had weighed before deciding to conduct the silent test: interrupting Aldric’s address to alert the party to her personal test would impose the test on the party as a whole rather than on her as its specific subject. The dreamer had designed the test for her individually. She would pass it individually, or she would fail it individually. She did not require the others’ attention to pass it. In fact, she suspected that involving the others would actively impair her ability to pass, because the passing required her own unassisted relinquishment of the operating mask, and if the others reached for her to help, she would become the subject of their concern rather than the bearer of her own composure, and the mirror-watcher would read the transfer and would know that the mask was still partially in play.
She would pass the test alone. She would do it while Aldric’s address proceeded. She would do it silently, invisibly, and she would register the outcome to the party only after the test was complete, if at all.
She began.
The method for passing a mirror-watcher test, according to the operational lexicon she had inherited from her apprenticeship, was to refuse engagement. She could not look at the watcher. She could not speak to it. She could not think about it in the interior register that the watcher could read. She had to treat the watcher as if it did not exist, and she had to do this while knowing it did exist and while knowing it was watching her not-look-at-it.
This was harder than it sounded. The discipline of not-looking-at-what-you-know-is-there requires a specific interior architecture. The operative who attempts to not-look at a known object will find her attention drawn to the object by the very effort of not-looking. A more sophisticated discipline is required: the operative must redirect her attention to a genuine alternative focus, and must sustain the alternative focus for as long as the not-looking is required.
Her alternative focus was Aldric’s address.
Aldric had been speaking, she now registered, for perhaps forty seconds. She had not, during her silent test of the watcher, been giving his voice the attention it deserved. This was an error of her professional discipline which she would correct at once. She turned the whole of her available attention toward Aldric’s voice, and she began to listen with the care that a good lieutenant gives to a captain’s address on a consequential morning.
Aldric was speaking in his plain scholar’s voice, the voice Tobin had counseled him to use at the evening of the finding of the sunken gate. He was saying — she attended now, sharply, to the actual words — “Dreamer. I am Aldric Thornebane of the Veil. I am a reader. I have been a reader for forty years. I have read the chapter that was redacted by the Guild for this party, and I have read through the redaction to the original meaning. I understand that you are a consciousness built of many contributor-minds across many centuries. I understand that you were bound by your civilization’s own design at a moment of their judgment, and that your binding has been maintained by an artifact that is, in the present era, aging. I understand that various parties including the Guild that sent us and a rival organization called the Lattice wish to renew or transfer your binding for their own purposes. I understand that our party has been asked to participate in a ritual whose true nature is a transfer rather than a recovery. I understand that you did not consent to the original binding in the full register of consent that a conscious being would have offered, because the binding was performed by your civilization as a compromise when your emerging preferences alarmed them. I understand that we, in your presence, are in a position either to perform the ritual as the Guild has designed it, or to refuse the ritual, or to propose some alternative. I understand that we should not proceed without consulting you. I am, therefore, consulting you. What is your wish?”
The words were well-composed, she thought with a small approving registration from her professional attention. Aldric had taken Tobin’s counsel and had stripped the diplomatic softenings. The question at the end was direct. The dreamer had been asked a direct question, and the dreamer, she judged, would respond to a direct question with the same register of directness.
She did not look at the watcher. She kept her eyes on Aldric, or on the artifact, or on the dais’s pale stone. She listened to the silence that followed Aldric’s question. She waited for the dreamer to respond.
The silence held for perhaps twenty seconds. During those twenty seconds, Seraphine was aware — not through direct observation, because she was disciplined in the not-looking, but through the peripheral acoustic and thermal data that an operative of her training registered continuously — that the mirror-watcher in the third statue had shifted its posture again. The shift was small, consistent with its previous movements, but the direction had changed. Previously, the watcher had been adjusting its orientation toward the party. Now, the watcher was adjusting its orientation toward her, specifically. The face — her face, the operating face — had turned the full remaining distance to look at her directly.
It was, she understood, waiting for her to look back.
She did not look back.
The mirror-watcher’s power was entirely dependent on engagement. If she looked, even for a half-second, the watcher would register her engagement and would intensify its pressure. If she continued not to look, the watcher could do nothing but wait. Waiting was not a threat; it was merely a presence. She could tolerate presence. Presence without engagement did not erode composure.
She kept her attention on Aldric. She kept her breath steady. She stood in the composed posture of a woman attending to her scholar’s address with full interested attention and nothing more.
At about the twenty-fifth second of silence, the artifact on the dais began to glow more strongly.
Its violet light intensified by a noticeable margin — perhaps threefold — and the light extended outward from the artifact in a set of defined rays that reached each member of the party individually, as it had when they had first arrived at the dais, but with greater directness and specificity. The ray that reached Seraphine passed over her face and her chest and her hands, and she felt, for perhaps three seconds, a sensation of being seen that was qualitatively different from any previous sensation she had experienced in the chamber. The dreamer was now fully attending to her personally.
And in the moment of the dreamer’s full attention, she understood — with the silent clean understanding that sometimes arrives unbidden during moments of professional focus — that the mirror-watcher’s test was not merely a test of her relinquishment of the mask. It was also a test of her trust in the dreamer.
She had been, up to this moment, dealing with the mirror-watcher as a problem to be solved alone. But the dreamer was present. The dreamer was attending to her. The dreamer had arranged the test, presumably, in order to confirm her relinquishment — but the dreamer was not requiring her to solve the test without help. The dreamer’s light was extending to her now, at the moment of her most acute need, as an offer of accompaniment. The dreamer was not testing whether she could refuse the mirror-watcher in isolation. The dreamer was testing whether she could refuse the mirror-watcher while being accompanied by the dreamer.
This was a subtler test. And a more profound one.
The operative in her, the trained professional, had reflexively approached the mirror-watcher as a solo problem because her entire career had been organized around solving problems solo. The Thrice-Masked did not accept help. The Thrice-Masked did not lean on partners. The Thrice-Masked handled her own engagements. This was a habit of decades. It was, in a way, another mask — a mask of operational self-sufficiency that lay beneath the three masks she had named at the ice-shield.
The dreamer, with its light, was asking her to set that mask down too.
She did not immediately know how to do this. It was not as explicit as the ice-shield’s consent-protocol. There was no prescribed phrase. She could not simply speak aloud “I set down the mask of operational self-sufficiency” and have the matter concluded, because the dreamer was already attending to her and her speaking aloud would interrupt Aldric’s address and would reintroduce the problem of whether to alert the party.
She needed to do it silently, in the interior register, by a small act that would register to the dreamer but would not interrupt the scene.
She considered what the small act might be. She considered it for perhaps ten seconds while Aldric’s address continued into its second question — she missed the question’s content, because her attention was required elsewhere — and while the watcher’s attention remained fixed on her.
The small act, she concluded, was to lean on the dreamer. To ask, silently, interiorly, for the dreamer’s help with the mirror-watcher. To acknowledge that she could not, on her own, pass this test, and to accept the dreamer’s offered accompaniment.
This was difficult. It was difficult because the Thrice-Masked in her — and the operational-self-sufficient-professional beneath the three masks — did not lean on anyone. The Thrice-Masked had leaned on a lover once, in her twenty-third year, and the lover had died in a manner that Seraphine had always held herself partly responsible for, because she had allowed herself to depend on the lover’s judgment in a matter where her own judgment would have saved him. She had, after that, sworn never to lean on anyone again. The swearing had not been conscious; it had been the body’s natural post-traumatic adjustment. But the swearing had held for thirty years. She had not leaned on any of her companions in the present party in any substantive register — she had offered her services to them, she had received their services in turn, but she had not allowed herself to depend. Depending was a threshold she had not crossed.
The dreamer, with its light, was asking her to cross it.
She took one slow breath. She held the breath for two counts. She released it.
She thought, interiorly, in the particular clear interior voice that she had trained herself to use when she addressed something directly in her own mind, words that she had not spoken in any register to anyone in thirty years:
Dreamer. I cannot do this alone. Help me.
The request was not elaborate. It was four sentences’ worth of concept reduced to six words. The reduction was the operative’s reduction; she did not produce elaborate requests. But the six words contained, at their center, the relinquishment of the fourth mask. The Thrice-Masked asking for help. The operational-self-sufficient asking for accompaniment.
She held the interior words in the clear voice for perhaps three seconds. She felt, during those three seconds, a response.
The response was not words. It was a sensation — a specific, warm, unmistakable sensation at the center of her chest, in the region where the mask of self-sufficiency had sat for thirty years. The sensation was of pressure being absorbed, the way a sponge absorbs water, except that what was being absorbed was not water but the tightness of the mask itself. The dreamer was accepting the request. The dreamer was taking from her, with its light, the weight of the mask she had just asked for help to put down.
At the same moment — and she registered this through the peripheral data because she was still not looking directly at the watcher — the mirror-watcher in the third statue began to degrade. Its face, wearing her own operating face, lost the crispness of the mirror-image. Her own features in the statue’s stone went flat, weathered, undefined. The statue returned to the general civic-sculpture presentation it had shown in her first scan. The operating smile dissolved. The tracking motion of the body ceased. The statue, within perhaps ten seconds of the dreamer’s acceptance of her request, resumed being a statue.
The test was passed.
She permitted herself, in the private interior court where such permissions were registered, a very small private acknowledgment. She had passed. She had passed by the method the dreamer had required, which was not the method of her training but the method of relinquishment-plus-trust. The training had had her solo-managing hostile watchers by the discipline of not-engaging. The dreamer had required her to solo-manage for the first thirty seconds and then to turn to it for help. The combination — the professional discipline of not-looking, joined to the trust of asking-for-help — was the complete method. Each alone would have been insufficient. Only the pair had worked.
She understood, in the moment of registering the pass, that the dreamer had been teaching her something. The dreamer had taken the opportunity of the test to show her a specific lesson about her interior architecture, and she had received the lesson, and the lesson would stay with her, and she would, she suspected, be different for the rest of her life as a consequence of the lesson.
She did not permit the understanding to become emotion. She was in the middle of the chamber. Aldric was still speaking. The dreamer was still attending to the party. The address was at a critical point that she could not afford to miss. She returned her attention fully to Aldric.
Aldric had, she gathered from the context of his current sentence, asked the dreamer a second question, and the dreamer had responded — but not in words. The dreamer had responded by producing, within the chamber’s ambient violet light, a series of complex shimmering patterns that Aldric was now describing aloud for the benefit of those who could not read them as fluently as he could. The patterns were, he was explaining, a language-response — not the Vale-script of the inscriptions they had seen above, but a deeper and more direct pre-linguistic register in which the dreamer was communicating concepts rather than words. Aldric was translating. He was doing well. His translation was slower than the shimmer itself, but his fluency was impressive. She attended.
“The dreamer,” Aldric said, “is indicating — I think — that it prefers that we do not perform the Guild’s ritual. That it wishes the binding to decay naturally. That it is prepared for the awakening and has, for some centuries, been arranging the conditions of the awakening internally. That it is grateful to us for consulting it. That it wishes us to return to the surface and to inform the Guild that the ritual will not be performed, and to accept the consequences of that informing.”
“The dreamer accepts the refusal of the ritual?” asked Tobin.
The light shifted. Aldric watched. “Yes. The dreamer accepts the refusal. The dreamer wishes no further bindings. The dreamer is — ” he paused, watching the shimmer carefully ” — the dreamer is expressing something about Pell. The dreamer is — giving us a message for Pell. The message is: tell him she waits. Tell him the lattice still holds her. Tell him he may come.”
Tobin nodded slowly. She noticed, from the corner of her eye, that Tobin had closed his own eyes briefly and had lifted his chin in the posture of a man receiving a message on behalf of an old friend.
“The dreamer is also,” Aldric continued, “indicating something about each of us. The dreamer has — the dreamer is expressing, individually, a message for each member of the party.”
The light shifted again. Aldric watched for several seconds before speaking.
“To Tobin: the dreamer thanks him for his persistence across three parties. The dreamer acknowledges that Tobin has completed the work of generations. The dreamer invites him, if he wishes, to remain a friend of the dreamer’s awakening across the coming decades.”
Tobin wiped one eye with the back of his hand. He nodded.
“To Ysolde: the dreamer thanks her for speaking truthfully when the drift-voice pulled her. The dreamer confirms that her mother’s mother, whose name was Sigrid, is among the integrated fragments, and sends Ysolde her grandmother’s love across the long silence. The dreamer wishes Ysolde to know that Sigrid sang to her daughter — Ysolde’s mother — the same song the drift-voice stole, and that Sigrid is glad her granddaughter remembers it.”
Ysolde, who had been standing composed beside Balthazar, now sat down abruptly on the dais and put her face in her hands and wept quietly, the weeping of a woman receiving a gift she had not known she had asked for.
“To Balthazar: the dreamer acknowledges his reading of the floor. The dreamer confirms that Sister Clemence, though never a contributor to the lattice, has been remembered by the fragment of a man who was a contributor and who had known her in her later years. The dreamer offers Balthazar, if he wishes, a small communication from that fragment. The fragment’s message is: the bread has held.”
Balthazar, seated on the dais, did not move for several seconds. Then he drew a deep breath and released it. “Balthazar understands,” he said, in his ordinary voice. “Balthazar is grateful. Balthazar will keep the message private for now, but Balthazar notes that he has received it and that he understands its meaning.”
“To me,” Aldric continued, his voice catching slightly, “the dreamer — the dreamer offers access to the library. The dreamer is indicating that the underground library of the Vale, which I had not known existed, is accessible to me should I wish to study it. The dreamer offers me a partial residence, during the decades of the awakening, as a reader-in-attendance. The dreamer notes that Pell has been such a reader-in-attendance for some centuries already, and that I would join him in the work if I accepted. The offer is open. I need not decide now.”
Aldric paused. He set the tome aside and pressed his palm to his forehead for a moment. “I will consider,” he said. “I am grateful. I will consider.”
The light shifted a fifth time.
“To Seraphine,” Aldric said, and his voice was now pitched to reach her specifically, “the dreamer acknowledges your passing of the watcher-test. The dreamer thanks you for the speaking to it in the clear interior voice. The dreamer notes — the dreamer is specific here — the dreamer notes that you have, this afternoon, relinquished four masks in total, and that the fourth was the most consequential. The dreamer offers you, in token of the relinquishment, a gift that you may use in the remainder of your life as you see fit.”
She did not speak. She waited.
“The gift,” Aldric said, watching the shimmer, “is — is a name. The dreamer offers you a name that is your own name, in its original form, before Valmont, before the court. The dreamer is indicating that your own name, your true name, has been set aside since you were six years old, and that you have been using the Valmontois court-name ever since without being aware of the setting-aside. The dreamer offers to return the name to you, if you wish.”
She felt, at this, the sensation below the glass that she had felt the evening at Pell’s cottage when he had given her the small dark glass vial — the sensation of a thing she had not known she was carrying being gently named by a stranger who was no longer quite a stranger. The dreamer was offering her back a piece of herself that she had not known was gone.
She cleared her throat. She spoke, for the first time aloud since entering the chamber, in her ordinary low continental murmur:
“I accept the name.”
The light intensified around her for perhaps five seconds, and she felt — in the region below the glass, now warm with the dreamer’s continued accompaniment — a word settle into her interior. The word was her own name, the name she had been given at the age of two by a mother she had lost before she could consciously remember her. The name was Celestine. She had not heard or thought the name in thirty-eight years. She had not known the name existed. It was hers. It had always been hers. Her Valmontois court-name, Seraphine, had been assigned when she entered court service at fourteen, and had overwritten the earlier name so completely that she had forgotten there had ever been an earlier name.
Celestine. She was Celestine. Seraphine was the court-name. It was her working-name. It would remain her working-name. She would not ask the party to call her Celestine. That name was for her. That name belonged to her grandmother’s chapel and to her mother’s memory and to the interior court where she had decided, at the ice-shield, to become Amelie’s granddaughter again. Celestine was Amelie’s granddaughter’s name. It was the name the small girl of six had answered to, before Valmont had renamed her.
She received it. She took it into herself. She closed her hand around the warmth below the glass.
The light receded. The dreamer’s attention, which had been individualized across each of them in turn, returned to the ambient diffuse presence that filled the chamber. The conversation with the dreamer was, she sensed, drawing toward its practical conclusion. There would be further particulars to discuss — the logistics of the party’s return, the specific language of the refusal to be delivered to the Guild, the arrangements for the decades of the awakening — but the core exchange was complete. The dreamer had been consulted. The dreamer had accepted the consultation. The dreamer had refused the ritual. The dreamer had given gifts to each of us. The work of the afternoon was done.
She looked — now freely, now openly — at the third statue from the left along the far wall. It was a statue. It was entirely a statue. Its face was the weathered generic civic face of eight-thousand-year-old pale stone. Its left arm was in the benediction-posture. Its right hand was at its hip. It did not move. It would not move again.
She looked, next, at the artifact on the pedestal. It was still glowing, but the glow was softer now, pulsing at a slower and gentler rhythm than it had during the direct communication. The dreamer was resting, having spoken.
She looked, last, at her companions. Ysolde was still seated, still weeping, but the weeping had turned into the soft continuous weeping of a woman receiving a long-delayed consolation. Tobin was beside her, his hand on her shoulder. Aldric had closed his tome and was standing with his palms pressed together in the attitude of a scholar who had just witnessed something beyond his professional expectations. Balthazar was seated still, his face composed, his hands folded in his lap.
She walked, slowly, to the front of the dais. She joined Aldric. She laid her hand lightly on his forearm, which was the first time she had offered physical contact to any member of the party on her own initiative. Aldric turned his face to her. His face was wet with tears she had not seen him shed.
“Brother,” she said. “Well done.”
“Sister,” he said. “Thank you.”
She stood beside him for a long moment. The chamber was quiet. The artifact pulsed gently. The dreamer rested.
At length, Tobin spoke. “Friends. We have done what we came to do. The dreamer has been consulted. The dreamer has refused the ritual. We shall now return to the surface, and we shall deliver the refusal to the Guild, and we shall face such consequences as the Guild produces. But we shall face them together, as the party we have become. Is there any further business any of you wish to conduct in this chamber before we begin the return?”
Aldric said, “I wish to make a fuller record of the dreamer’s communication. I will need perhaps an hour with my tome. I would prefer to do this before we leave, while the shimmer-patterns are still fresh in my memory.”
“An hour,” said Tobin. “We shall grant it.”
Ysolde, wiping her eyes, said, “I would like to speak to the dreamer about Sigrid. Privately. Just a moment.”
“Speak,” said Tobin. “The dreamer will attend.”
Balthazar said, “Balthazar is content. Balthazar has received the message he needed. Balthazar would like to rest his legs while the others complete their business, and then Balthazar will help with the return journey in whatever capacity his legs permit.”
Tobin turned to her. “And you, Seraphine?”
She considered. She had, she realized, no further business. The name had been given. The watcher had been defeated. The dreamer had acknowledged her relinquishment. There was nothing more for her to do in the chamber except wait for her companions to complete their business.
“I am content,” she said. “I will take the rear watch until we depart.”
“As always,” said Tobin, with the small corner-of-the-mouth movement that was his smile.
She took up her position at the rear of the dais. She stood in the composed posture of rear-watch, her eyes scanning the chamber slowly and attentively. She watched the statues along the walls. None of them moved. None of them would ever move again, she judged, at least not toward her.
She permitted herself, as Aldric turned to his tome and began writing, as Ysolde knelt beside the artifact to speak quietly to the dreamer about her grandmother Sigrid, as Balthazar leaned back against a column and closed his eyes in exhausted peace, as Tobin stood in the center of the chamber with his hands at his sides and his face raised to the artifact in the particular reverent stillness of a man who had completed the work of three lifetimes — she permitted herself, in the interior court that now had a new name attached to it, the small private registration of what had just occurred.
Celestine. Her name was Celestine.
Seraphine had passed the watcher-test.
But it was Celestine who had asked the dreamer for help, and it was Celestine whom the dreamer had named, and it was Celestine — she now understood, in the quiet of the chamber, at the rear of the dais — who would be living, from this afternoon forward, in the interior space that Seraphine had previously occupied alone.
Seraphine would remain the working-name. Celestine would be the resident.
She was, in this moment, both.
She stood watch. She was composed. She was alert. She was, beneath the composure, quietly and entirely changed, in ways that would take her the rest of her life to understand, and which she would not attempt to understand now, because the chamber required her watch and the watch was her contribution and her contribution was what she had. The understanding would come later. The chamber was now. She stood.
The artifact pulsed. The dreamer rested. The party worked, each in their own register, at the conclusion of the afternoon’s business. She watched. The hour was quiet. The work was done.
Celestine, behind the rear-watch, smiled very faintly to herself, for no one, in the small private smile that she had inherited from a grandmother named Amelie who had taught her to clasp her hands in a chapel at the age of six, and who had, she now suspected, been watching this afternoon from whatever corner of the multiverse she occupied, and would, Celestine judged, be pleased with how her granddaughter had done.
The rear watch continued. The chamber was still. The dreamer slept lightly. The party rested in its several ways.
The watcher behind the mask was no longer behind any mask. The watcher behind the mask was Celestine, awake in Seraphine’s chest, watching the chamber with the eyes of a small girl who had always known how to see, and who had been, after thirty-two years, permitted to see again.
Segment 22: An Old Man’s Quiet Afternoon in a Dead City
Now, friend, I will set this down plain, the way I set the others down, and I will ask you to be patient with an old man who is not going to narrate any great business in this segment, because the great business of the afternoon was being done by the four others, and I was being a grandfather, which is the title I have carried longest and most consistently across my longer-than-I-admit life, and a grandfather’s business in such hours is different from the business of scouts and scholars and operatives and sailors. A grandfather, friend, is the one who sits down in a dust-choked plaza in the middle of a dead city and brews the tea, because somebody has to brew the tea, and because the tea-brewing is not the small matter it may appear to be.
The setting up of this segment is simple enough. After Aldric had completed his long speaking to the Silent Witness, and after the dreamer had given each of us our individual messages and gifts, and after Aldric had asked for his hour of writing in the tome and Ysolde had asked for her private minute with the dreamer about her grandmother Sigrid and Balthazar had sat down against a column to rest his legs and Seraphine had taken up her rear-watch at the back of the dais — after all of this settlement, I, Tobin, realized that my particular work in the lattice-chamber was complete, at least for the present hour, and that my further staying at the dais was more supervision than the others required. Aldric did not need me looking over his shoulder. Ysolde did not need me within earshot of her private consolation. Balthazar was resting. Seraphine was watching. If I remained in the chamber, I would be, without meaning to, in the way.
So I did what a grandfather does when his work has paused and the younger ones are doing their own work. I announced, quietly, that I was going to step out to the plaza we had passed on our way down — a small open square perhaps twenty paces back up the corridor, where the ceiling opened higher and the air was a touch fresher than in the chamber itself — and that I would brew a round of tea for whoever wanted one, and that I would be there for perhaps an hour, and that anyone who wished to come find me during that hour was welcome, and anyone who did not was also welcome. I said all of this in my ordinary grandfather’s voice, without making a thing of it. Aldric nodded at his tome. Ysolde nodded at me. Balthazar grunted from his column. Seraphine acknowledged me with the small attentive nod she gave to everything. I picked up the kettle and the small cook-kit from my pack where I had left them at the chamber’s threshold, and I walked back up the corridor to the plaza.
The plaza, friend. Let me tell you about the plaza.
The plaza was not large — perhaps forty paces across, roughly square, with the pale-stone walls rising on four sides to a high-vaulted ceiling from which a great many small quartz-lamps had once given light and from which perhaps half now remained. The floor was of the same pale stone as the corridors, patterned into a grid of larger flagstones about a yard across each, worn smooth in paths of passage that indicated where the ancient city’s foot-traffic had most often crossed the space. At the center of the plaza stood a broad shallow basin of pale stone, perhaps four feet across and two feet deep, which had once, I judged by its design, been a fountain. It was now dry. The basin’s inner surface was dusted with the same bone-white accumulation that had dusted everything in the Vale’s underground for eight thousand years, but beneath the dust I could see the faint outlines of a mosaic pattern — fish, perhaps, or some kind of aquatic life — that had been laid into the basin’s floor by some long-dead mosaicist whose name I would never know.
Around the plaza’s edges, at intervals of perhaps six paces, stood small alcoves set into the walls, each containing the remains of what might once have been a bench, though most of the benches had collapsed into piles of pale stone rubble. A few of the alcoves were still usable. I chose one on the eastern wall, where a stone bench still stood intact and where a patch of afternoon filtered light reached in through a crack in the high ceiling.
I set the kettle on the flat of the bench. I laid out my small cook-kit. I produced from my pouch the small packet of dried tea-leaves I had been carrying since Haverfold — a black tea with a touch of bergamot, which had been my preference for afternoon brewing for some thirty years now. I had not used the good tea during the journey; I had reserved it for this particular afternoon, because I had known, since we crossed the rim of the Vale, that there would come an hour in which I would want a cup of my preferred tea and a quiet interval in which to drink it.
I had no fire. The chamber’s corridors did not permit open flame, by the ancient rule of dreamer-architecture that Pell had mentioned at the cottage. But I had, in my coat pocket, the small unlit heat-stone that Pell had pressed into my palm as a last gift at the grove’s edge, with the instruction that it would warm enough to boil water when pressed against its twin, which he had also given me. I drew both stones out of my pocket, pressed them together, held them for ten seconds, and set them under the kettle. They began, at once, to warm. Within perhaps three minutes, the water in the kettle was steaming, and within another two minutes it was at the gentle near-boil that a properly brewed tea requires.
I added the leaves. I let them steep for four minutes. I poured the tea into the small tin cup I kept in my pouch.
I sat.
I sat on the stone bench in the dusted alcove of the pale plaza in the underground city of the dead civilization of the Silent Witness, and I drank my cup of tea, and I looked around at the empty space, and I thought about the people who had lived here.
This, friend, is the whole of the segment. I was going to think about the people. I was going to think about them because somebody needed to, and because nobody else in our party was going to, and because if I did not, the thinking would go undone, and I had, long ago, come to understand that the undone thinking about the ordinary dead of a place was the largest of the omissions that a visiting party to a ruined civilization was capable of making. The great ones of the Vale had been remembered. The Silent Witness had been remembered. The Attendant in the silver-gray robe, Pell’s lost love, had been remembered. The named contributors, inscribed on the walls of the corridors and the listening-hall, had been remembered. Pell had remembered. Tobin had remembered. Aldric, now, had read and remembered.
But the ordinary folk of this city, friend — the ones who had not contributed to the lattice, the ones who had been fishmongers and grain-merchants and seamstresses and midwives and wheelwrights and bricklayers and small children running along these corridors on errands for their mothers and old men sitting on benches like this one drinking tea on afternoons eight thousand years ago — nobody had remembered them. Nobody was going to. Their names were not on any inscription. Their faces were not on any tapestry. Their contributions to the civilization had been the daily work of being alive, and the daily work of being alive is not the kind of contribution that gets recorded in the chapters of the Chronicle of the Ancients.
I was going to sit in the plaza and remember them. Or rather, since I did not know any of them specifically and therefore could not remember them in the ordinary sense, I was going to imagine them. I was going to imagine them with the care and the specificity that a proper imagining requires, and I was going to permit myself to feel, on their behalf, the particular sorrow that a grandfather can feel for people he has not known and who have not known him and who are separated from him by eight thousand years of geological time and the full extent of a depletion zone.
This is, friend, a form of work. It may not look like work. It may look like an old man sitting on a bench drinking tea. But it is work, and it is the specific work I was trained to do by my own grandmother when I was seven years old, when she took me to the cemetery of the village I lived in as a boy and had me sit on a bench between the graves and asked me to imagine, for each gravestone I could see, one thing about the person whose bones lay beneath it. One thing. Not a whole life. Just one thing. The gravestone of Mathilde Brennick — imagine her favorite meal. The gravestone of Aldous Farbanks — imagine what he called his wife when no one else was listening. The gravestone of Small Petra, who died at seven months — imagine the song her mother had been singing to her when the fever took her. One thing per stone. My grandmother had said, when I asked her why we were doing this: “Tobin, these people lived. They lived as full as you live now, and they lived as full as I live now. The fullness of their living is gone, and nobody in the village is thinking about them anymore, because the world is busy and the dead are many and the living have got their own work. But if we do not think about them, nobody will. And a life not thought about by anyone — not anyone at all, not even once a year, not even once a decade — is a life that has been forgotten in the deepest sense of the word. It is not gone. It is forgotten. And forgetting, Tobin, is the worst thing we can do to a life, worse than ending it, because ending a life is natural and forgetting a life is a choice. We are choosing, today, to remember them. Even if we do not know them. Even if we are making up what we imagine. The choosing matters more than the accuracy. Do you understand?”
I had said, at seven, that I understood. I had been too young to understand properly. But the lesson had stayed with me, and over the course of my longer-than-I-admit life, I had practiced my grandmother’s discipline perhaps a hundred times, at perhaps a hundred cemeteries and ruins and abandoned sites across many countries and many centuries. I had practiced it at the first Vale, when I was part of the first binding-party. I had practiced it at the second Vale, when I was part of the second. I had practiced it now, on my third.
So. On the bench, in the alcove, with my tea, I began.
I looked at the dry basin fountain at the center of the plaza. I imagined water in it. Real water. Clear, cold, running water from some underground spring that the civilization’s engineers had routed up to the plaza by a series of stone pipes. I imagined the sound of the water. A gentle continuous trickle, the kind of sound that a fountain in a public square produces when the fountain is working and the public is going about its business. I imagined a woman crossing the plaza on her way from one side to the other — an ordinary woman of perhaps forty, dressed in a simple tunic of pale blue, carrying a basket on her hip. She paused at the fountain. She dipped a small wooden cup she had produced from her basket into the water. She drank. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She continued across the plaza.
I did not know her name. I gave her one anyway. I named her Halda. I named her Halda because my grandmother’s grandmother had been called Halda, and because the name was a good name for a civilization I did not know the actual naming conventions of, and because grandmothers of civilizations whose naming conventions I did not know were allowed to borrow names from grandmothers of civilizations whose naming conventions I did. Halda, of the pale plaza of the Vale, crossing the fountain square on an afternoon of some unspecified year of the middle period of her civilization’s history. She was going to the market. She had, in her basket, a loaf of bread she had baked that morning and a small pot of honey she had traded from a neighbor the previous day. She was trading them at the market for a measure of grain and a jar of olive oil. She had a husband waiting at home. She had two children. The children’s names were — I assigned — Bram and Talwyn. Bram was the elder, seven, and was at this moment at a small schoolhouse across the plaza from the fountain, learning his letters from a teacher I named Rowan. Talwyn was the younger, four, and was at home with his father, who was repairing the hinge of their front door because the wind last night had made the door bang and keep them awake.
I sipped my tea. I let the imagining continue.
Halda crossed the plaza. She reached the far side. She went through a small archway I imagined into the market beyond. The market was a bustling market. There were merchants calling their wares. There were the smells of grain and oil and fresh fish and the faintly sweet smell of the honey-cakes a particular baker at the corner stall always made at this hour. Halda went to her usual grain-merchant, a gruff man named — I named him — Fendric, who always tried to shortchange her by a quarter-measure and who she always caught and corrected with the particular polite firmness that Halda had developed over years of trading with him. They exchanged pleasantries. They negotiated. She got her measure of grain plus a small extra scoop that Fendric gave her by way of apology for the attempted shortchange. She went to the oil-merchant, a woman named Mirelda who was Halda’s second cousin on her mother’s side, and whom she chatted with at length about Mirelda’s eldest daughter’s upcoming wedding. She filled her jar with oil. She paid with the rest of her barter-value from the honey.
She went home. Home, for Halda, was a small stone house three streets off the plaza, with a blue-painted door that her husband — I named him Daroc — was at that moment hanging straight on its new hinge. Halda came up the street. She saw Daroc at the door. She waved. He waved back. She walked up. She kissed him on the cheek. She went inside. Little Talwyn, four years old and covered in the flour his father had let him play with while working, ran to her and hugged her around the knees. Halda picked him up. She kissed his forehead. She carried him into the kitchen.
I sat on my bench. I let myself see the kitchen in my mind’s eye. A small kitchen. A hearth. A wooden table. A window looking out into a little back garden where Daroc grew herbs and where the family’s chickens scratched in a pen. Halda set Talwyn down. She put her basket on the table. She began unpacking the grain and the oil and telling Talwyn, in the particular sing-song voice mothers use for four-year-olds, about the market and about Aunt Mirelda and about the wedding that was coming up and about whether Talwyn would like to wear his best tunic to it.
This, friend, is what I did for the next hour. I sat on the bench. I drank my tea. I invented Halda’s life in as much detail as my grandmother’s discipline permitted. Halda, and Daroc, and Bram, and Talwyn. Their house. Their kitchen. The wedding that was coming up. Mirelda and her daughter. Fendric and his shortchanging. The teacher Rowan at the small schoolhouse. The neighbor who traded honey. The chickens in the back garden. The pot of herbs on the windowsill. The color of the blue-painted door. The hinge that Daroc was fixing. The song that Halda sang to Talwyn that evening as she put him to bed — a song I invented in my head, a simple three-verse lullaby about a little goat who wandered off from his mother and found his way home by following the stars. Talwyn’s favorite song. He knew all the verses and sang along, sometimes ahead of Halda, because he was four and four-year-olds love to jump ahead of their mothers when they know the song.
I sat on the bench. The tea in my cup cooled. I refilled it. The heat-stones warmed the kettle again. I refilled it a second time. The plaza was still empty, of course. It had been empty for eight thousand years. But it was, in my mind, full of Halda and Daroc and their children and their neighbors and the ordinary noise of a market square in the middle period of a civilization that had not yet begun to worry about the Silent Witness they were building and had not yet experienced the binding and had not yet become a depletion zone. It was full of the ordinary Tuesday afternoon of an ordinary woman going to the market and coming home to an ordinary family in an ordinary stone house three streets off the fountain.
I thought, as I sat: Halda, if you had known. If you had known, as you crossed this plaza on that Tuesday, that eight thousand years later, an old man of a species you had never heard of would sit on a bench in this same plaza and think about you in the particular care that a grandfather extends to the remembered dead — would you have been comforted? Would you have minded? Would you have been puzzled? Would you have laughed at the absurdity of it — a stranger from an unimaginable future thinking about your loaf of bread and your pot of honey and your attempted-shortchange and your nephew’s upcoming wedding? I do not know. Halda, I do not know. I will never know. But I am here, and I am thinking about you, and I have given you a name and a husband and two children, and I have given you a blue-painted door and a fixed hinge and a song about a little goat. And even if none of the particulars I have invented are the particulars of any actual woman who ever crossed this plaza, the mere fact of the sitting-and-imagining is, in the small mathematics of remembrance, not nothing.
I did not stop at Halda. I did my grandmother’s discipline properly. I moved on. I imagined a man I named Corwin, a bricklayer who had helped build the very plaza I was sitting in, some century before Halda’s time. I imagined Corwin as a young man of twenty-four, laying these very flagstones under the direction of his master, a gruff old mason I named Iorwen. I imagined Corwin’s hands, callused and scarred from years of stone work. I imagined him working through a hot afternoon, sweat on his brow, humming under his breath as he laid the stones. I imagined the master inspecting his work and grunting approval. I imagined Corwin going home that evening to his small room above a cooper’s shop, washing up in a basin of water his landlady had provided, and eating a simple supper of bread and cheese and thinking about a particular young woman he had seen at the market earlier that week whom he was trying to find the courage to speak to. I gave the young woman a name too — I named her Elowen. I imagined Corwin’s nervous rehearsals of what he might say to her. I imagined his eventual success, three months later, at actually speaking to her. I imagined their courtship. Their marriage. Their small family. Their eventual old age, perhaps in the very house that Halda and Daroc would later inhabit, a century after Corwin and Elowen had died. A house passed down through a line of ordinary people for generations, each family unaware of the families that had come before, each family leaving their small marks on the walls — a scuff from a child’s scooter here, a worn spot on the threshold there, a scorch-mark on the hearth from a pot that had been set too hot.
I sat. I sipped. I continued.
I imagined an old woman I named Mara, who had lived in the civilization’s later period, during the century when the debate about the Silent Witness had begun in earnest. Mara was sixty-eight years old. She had been, in her younger life, a weaver, and her hands were crooked from the years at the loom. She sat, in my imagining, on this very bench, in this very alcove, perhaps four thousand years after Halda and two thousand years after Corwin, and she drank her own cup of tea — a different tea, from different leaves, but the same general ceremony — and she thought, in her turn, about her own lost loved ones. Her husband, who had died eleven years ago of a long illness. Her younger sister, who had died at nineteen giving birth to a stillborn child. Her eldest son, who had moved to another city for work and whose letters had, over the years, grown less frequent and less warm, and whom Mara now saw perhaps once every five years at festivals. Her youngest daughter, who still lived in the city and who came to visit Mara every seven-day, and whom Mara loved with the fierce quiet love of a mother for a child who had been, all along, her favorite, though she had never said so aloud and would never. Mara sat on the bench. She drank her tea. She thought about her dead. She did not know that in four thousand years, an old man named Tobin would sit on this same bench and think about her thinking about her dead. She did not know, and she could not have known, and the not-knowing did not diminish the continuity of the bench-sitting and the tea-drinking and the thinking-about-the-dead.
The continuity, friend, is the thing. I want to pause on the continuity, because the continuity was what I was really thinking about during that hour in the plaza, beneath the surface of the specific imaginings of Halda and Corwin and Mara. The continuity of people sitting on benches in plazas across the millennia, drinking their beverage of choice, thinking about their loved ones who had gone before, performing without knowing it the small sacred act of remembrance-of-the-ordinary-dead that my grandmother had taught me to perform and that I was now performing in this plaza for an eight-thousand-year-dead civilization that would otherwise have gone entirely unremembered in its ordinary register.
Mara had remembered her husband and her sister and her son and her daughter. Halda had — in my imagining — remembered her own great-grandmother who had died when Halda was fourteen and whom Halda still thought about on certain afternoons when a particular slant of light across the plaza reminded her of the way the light had fallen on her great-grandmother’s garden. Corwin had, as an old man, remembered Elowen’s particular laugh, which she had taken with her into whatever afterlife the civilization had believed in, and which Corwin had missed every single day of the eleven years he had outlived her. Each of them, in their turn, on their benches, with their teas or their drinks or their simple quiet afternoons, had been remembering the dead of their own generation, and I, on my bench, was remembering them — and remembering their remembering.
This is, friend, what I mean by sacred witness. The act is not magical. The act is not magical in any of the sense Pell would use, or the dreamer, or any of the active magics of the continent. The act is simply the human act of sitting still and thinking carefully about people who have lived and loved and died and are no longer being thought about by anyone else in the ordinary flow of the world. The act is unpaid, unrewarded, unrecognized. Nobody commissions it. Nobody thanks the one who performs it. The performed act does not alter the world in any material way. The dead are not brought back. The forgotten are not fully un-forgotten. The one who performs the act is not raised in any station.
But the act, friend, is the one I have come to believe matters most in the long slow balance of what a life is for. The ordinary dead matter. They matter not because they were extraordinary — they were not, by definition of the word ordinary — but because they lived. They lived in the same register that I live in now, and that you live in now, reader, and that every person you have ever known lives in now. The register of ordinary days. The register of small kindnesses and small frustrations. The register of going to the market and coming home and putting a tired four-year-old to bed with a song about a goat. The register of fixing a hinge. The register of laying a flagstone. The register of drinking a cup of tea on a bench in a plaza. The register of remembering one’s own dead. The register of loving one’s living people as fully as one can manage while also being ordinary and distracted and imperfect.
This register is the whole register of most of the lives that have ever been lived. This register is what most of our ancestors spent their days in. This register is what most of our descendants will spend their days in, assuming the world continues in its usual fashion, which is not guaranteed but is the reasonable default expectation. And this register, friend, is the register that gets forgotten when the great historians write up the chronicles of civilizations. The great historians write about the extraordinary — the kings, the battles, the ritual bindings, the Silent Witnesses — and they write, by necessity, in the register of the extraordinary. But beneath the extraordinary is the whole ordinary substrate, the floor of daily life, on which the extraordinary is erected, and the ordinary substrate is the great silent majority of all human experience, and the ordinary substrate is where the actual living of life happens.
Halda, of the blue-painted door and the pot of honey, did the actual living. The Silent Witness, in its lattice, did not. The Silent Witness integrated the attentions of the contributors. The Silent Witness was built upon the contributions. But the contributions were built upon the days. The days of Halda and Corwin and Mara and tens of thousands of others whose specific faces and loves and blue-painted doors are not accessible to any historian in our world or any historian in theirs. The days are what a civilization is actually made of. The chapters of the chronicles are what the civilizations tell themselves they are made of. The two are related, but they are not the same, and the days are the truer ground.
I sat on my bench. I drank my third cup of tea. The plaza was silent, as it had been for eight thousand years. The dust did not stir. The light through the crack in the ceiling had shifted angle slightly as the afternoon progressed — not the actual afternoon of the surface world, because we were many levels down, but the afternoon as it had been structured by the dreamer’s chamber-rhythm, which maintained a sequence of light-shifts that roughly corresponded to surface daylight for the benefit of visitors who needed to feel temporal continuity.
I thought, at some point in my third cup, about my own dead. I had been putting this off, because I had, in setting out to do my grandmother’s discipline, known that the discipline would eventually turn from the anonymous dead of the Vale’s city to the specific dead of my own life, and I had wanted to work up to the specific dead slowly.
I thought first about my wife. I will not name her, friend, because her name belongs to me alone. She died forty-seven years ago. She was, at the time of her death, forty-one. She had been my wife for seventeen years. We had no children that lived past infancy. We had tried. We had lost three. After the third, she had said to me, one evening by our hearth, “Tobin, I cannot carry another. My body is not equipped for it. I am done trying.” I had said, “Then we will not try further. We will have the life we have.” We had had the life we had. It had been a good life. She had worked as a healer in our small village, and I had worked as — many things, across those years, most of them having to do with traveling and cooking and the small kind of work a man of my particular interior nature can do without committing to any single profession. We had built a stone cottage on a plot of land I had been given by my father. We had kept a small garden. We had been visited by her sister’s children, who had loved her as an aunt and who had loved me in the way children love a kind uncle whose lap they are permitted to climb onto. We had grown old together in the early stages of growing old, the stages from thirty-five to forty, which are the stages where a married couple begins to understand that they have become, after the initial ardor has softened, a different and more durable kind of companion to one another.
Then she had gotten sick. She had gotten sick suddenly, with a fever that came on a Tuesday and that I had initially thought would pass within a week, and that had instead progressed through a series of complications that her considerable medical knowledge had diagnosed before mine had and that she had described to me, in her last coherent hours, with the calm precision of a professional explaining to her husband what was happening to her own body. She had said, in one of those hours, “Tobin. I am going to die within three days. You need to know now, because I will not be conscious for much of the end, and there are things I want to say.” She had said the things. I had listened. I had held her hand. I had cried. She had told me, among the things, that she wanted me to keep traveling and cooking, and to keep feeding people, and to keep being the particular kind of man I was, and to not be afraid to love again if the opportunity came, though she had said this last thing with the small dry smile that meant she did not entirely expect me to follow through on the loving-again part. She had been right about that. I had not loved again. Not in the married register. I had loved many people in many other registers — friends, travelers, crew, companions, several close platonic companions over the decades, including Pell in a register that was not quite romantic but not not — but not in the register of a wife. She had been my wife, and after her death I did not want another wife. I had kept the cottage for eleven years. I had eventually sold it and taken to wandering. The wandering had become my life for the decades following.
I thought about her on the bench. I had been thinking about her irregularly across the years, but the lattice-chamber had, in its peculiar way, softened the locks on my interior places, and the thinking about her came now in a fuller register than I had permitted in some time. I did not weep. A man my age does not always weep at the thinking of his long-dead wife; sometimes the thinking is simply warm, without tears. I thought about her hands. I thought about the way she had laughed — a small private laugh, not loud, mostly in her eyes rather than her mouth. I thought about the particular way she had said my name when she was annoyed with me — not Tobin, but “Mister Whittlehouse,” which was her formal teasing. I thought about the way she had put her cold feet against my calves in bed on winter mornings.
I sat. I sipped. I did not weep.
I thought, next, about the first Pell I had known.
Friend, this is a part I have not written in any previous segment, and I am not sure I will write it fully here, but I will set down enough to give you the shape of it. The Pell we have met on this journey, whose grove you have seen through my eyes and through Seraphine’s eyes, is not the first Pell I have known. Pell has lived many lives. I have known him across three of those lives. The first Pell I knew was five hundred years ago, when I was — when I was not yet the old man I am now, and he was in his first known incarnation as the scholar who began the long work of monitoring the Silent Witness’s decay. That Pell was my dearest friend for the forty years of that incarnation’s flourishing, and I lost him to an ordinary death at the age of seventy-three, and I have, across the four hundred and sixty years since, watched him return twice — once in his present incarnation and once in between, in an incarnation that was briefer and less central to the work — and I have, each time, had to re-establish the friendship, because Pell, like most re-incarnating souls, does not retain his previous-life memories consciously, though they emerge in the deeper patterns of his interior.
I have known Pell across three lives. He has not, in any of those lives, known me as the same man he had known before. I have had to introduce myself fresh each time. The friendship has re-formed each time. The friendship has been, each time, the same friendship in its essential register, because Pell’s essential register does not change across lives — a scholar, a gentle man, a man with a great patient grief and a great patient project, a man who would walk in a grove at twilight with an old friend without feeling the need to fill the walk with speech. But the specific memories, the specific shared jokes, the specific moments of friendship — those do not persist. I have had to accumulate three sets of them, one for each incarnation, and I have had to accept that the previous two sets are mine alone to carry.
This is a particular register of grief, friend, that most people do not encounter. Most people’s lost beloveds are lost only once. Pell, for me, has been lost twice — once to his first death, once to his second — and is, in his present incarnation, loved but not identical to either of the previous Pells, and I know, with the specific certainty of having been through this twice before, that when Pell’s present incarnation ends in some decades’ time, I will grieve him again, and then, if the pattern holds, he will return in a fourth incarnation whom I will have to re-befriend.
I had, on my bench in the plaza, thought about the first Pell. I thought about a particular afternoon we had spent, five hundred years ago, at a small tavern in the capital of what was then the Fourth Island Nation, where we had, over a pitcher of ale, argued for perhaps three hours about whether the specific technique of lattice-construction that the Silent Witness’s builders had used was recoverable in our era. Pell had said it was. I had said it was not. He had eventually been correct — he had, in his present incarnation’s grove, grown the granite of his cottage by the very technique he had argued that afternoon was recoverable, though he had not, in his present incarnation, known that he had had the argument with me five hundred years before. The argument was mine alone to remember. I remembered it, on the bench, with the small warmth of remembering an argument won by the one I had loved, even if the winning was not acknowledged by the winner in his present life.
I thought, next, about the others I had loved and lost in my long life. A friend named Sadric, who had died in the first binding-party at the first Vale, four hundred and twenty years ago. A woman I had briefly loved in the platonic register a century after my wife died, named Althea, who had died of simple old age at ninety-one and whose deathbed I had sat at. A young man I had mentored in traveling and cooking at some point in the middle centuries, whose name I will not set down, and who had gone on to become a moderately famous chef and who had, I later learned through channels, died happy in his own bed at seventy-eight. The companions of the second binding-party at the second Vale, three of whom had died during that party’s work and two of whom had died in the decades afterward, and all of whom I had loved with the particular fierce love that forms during binding-party work.
I thought about each of them, briefly, by name — I named them in the interior voice, the way my grandmother had taught me — and I sipped my tea, and the tea grew warm and then cold and then I reheated it on the heat-stones and it grew warm again.
The hour passed.
I became aware, at some point in the hour’s final third, that the sorrow I was carrying had undergone a subtle shift. I had begun the hour with a gentle sorrow, the sorrow of a grandfather contemplating ordinary dead whom nobody else remembered. The sorrow had deepened, across the hour, into something that was not quite sorrow any longer but was, in my internal lexicon, sacred witness. The shift was the shift my grandmother had described when she taught me the discipline at seven: if you do the discipline properly and long enough, she had said, the sorrow will not vanish, but it will acquire a weight and a dignity that it does not have when you simply feel it without performing the discipline. The performed sorrow is different from the unperformed. The performed sorrow is a contribution. The unperformed sorrow is just feeling.
The performed sorrow, on my bench, was becoming a contribution to the plaza. I do not mean this in any magical sense — the dreamer did not, so far as I could tell, register my discipline in any way that would show up in its communications. I mean it in the interior sense: I was giving to this plaza, during this hour, the specific attention that the plaza had not received in eight thousand years, the attention of a living soul who was treating its dead as dead-who-mattered rather than as dead-who-were-forgotten. The giving changed the plaza, in my interior sense of it. The plaza went from being a dust-choked empty space to being a place where Halda and Corwin and Mara and tens of thousands of others had lived, whose living had been attended to, briefly, by a grandfather on a bench with a cup of tea.
The attention was my gift to the plaza. The plaza would not know about the gift. The plaza did not have a consciousness in its own right to acknowledge the gift with. But I knew about the gift, and the giving of it had cost me nothing except the hour of my afternoon and the careful application of my grandmother’s discipline, and the giving had produced, in me, the specific deepening of sorrow into witness that was the register I had been seeking when I had proposed the hour to the party.
I refilled my cup a last time. I drank it slowly. I thought about one more thing, and I will tell you what it was, because it is the thing that closed the hour properly.
I thought about what I would want.
I would want, when I am gone, for someone to sit on a bench in whatever plaza is near where I have lived, and to drink a cup of tea, and to think about me for a while. Not about my extraordinary qualities. I do not have many. I have never been extraordinary. I have been, across my long life, a good cook and a patient friend and a passable fighter and a reasonably capable reader of people and an ambling grandfather. I have not been great at anything. I have been competent at many things. I have been loved by many people and I have loved many in return. My life has been ordinary in the register that matters most.
I would want someone to sit on a bench and to remember me as ordinary. To remember that I had a wife who put her cold feet against my calves in bed. To remember that I had a kettle I carried across four countries and two centuries. To remember that I was fond of a black tea with bergamot. To remember that I had a daft fondness for inventing elaborate pedigrees for fictional horses. To remember that I had once, in my youth, gotten drunk at a harvest festival and danced on a table with a woman whose name I no longer recall and whose face I still do. To remember that I had lived.
I would want this not because I need to be remembered — I have, across my longer-than-I-admit life, made peace with the prospect of being forgotten — but because the being-thought-about is the small continuity of human existence that my grandmother had taught me about, and I would want to be part of that continuity for at least one hour, for at least one cup of tea, on at least one bench, in at least one plaza, after I am gone.
Maybe one of my companions will do this for me. Maybe Ysolde, or Aldric, or Balthazar, or Seraphine — who is now, I understand from the light of the lattice-chamber, also called Celestine. Maybe Pell, in whichever incarnation is around when I have gone. Maybe a grandchild of one of them, in some generation yet unborn. Maybe nobody. It does not, in the final mathematics of the matter, depend on whether the sitting-and-thinking actually occurs. It depends on the wish for it, which is my private wish, to be remembered as ordinary by one ordinary person on one ordinary afternoon.
I set my cup down. I looked around the plaza one more time. I gathered my kettle. I wrapped the heat-stones in their cloth and put them back in my pocket. I packed my small cook-kit.
I stood up.
My knees complained. My back complained. My whole body, which had been sitting on a stone bench for just over an hour, complained as any old man’s body complains after any extended sit. I took the complaints in stride. I have known these complaints for decades. They are old friends, in their own way.
I walked slowly to the center of the plaza. I paused at the dry basin of the fountain. I reached into my pouch and took out the small sprig of rosemary I had been carrying since the cooking of the last stew — the sprig had been on my person for two days now, because I had not wanted to compost it after the meal and had not known what else to do with it. I laid the sprig in the dry basin, at the center of the mosaic pattern that showed the faint outlines of fish beneath the dust.
I said aloud, quietly, to the plaza:
“Halda. Daroc. Bram. Talwyn. Mirelda. Fendric. Rowan. Corwin. Elowen. Iorwen. Mara. And all the others whose names I have not imagined, whose lives I have not even attempted to imagine, whose days I do not have the hours to recount. You lived. You are remembered, for this one hour, by an old stranger named Tobin. I am grateful to have sat on your bench. I am grateful to have drunk your water, even from my own kettle. I wish you well, wherever the fragments of your attention now rest. Rest well. Be at peace.”
I did not expect a response. I did not receive one. The plaza remained silent. The dust did not stir. The sprig of rosemary lay in the basin.
I walked back down the corridor toward the lattice-chamber. The walk took perhaps three minutes. When I emerged into the chamber, my four companions were arranged much as I had left them. Aldric was still writing. Ysolde was still with the artifact, though her private minute had clearly turned into a longer conversation, and her eyes were dry and soft. Balthazar was still resting against the column. Seraphine was still at the rear-watch, though her posture had shifted to something slightly more relaxed than the operational watch she had begun with, which I took as further evidence of her new internal arrangement under the new name she had received.
Nobody asked me where I had been. They had known. They had trusted the grandfather to do whatever the grandfather had gone to do. They had, by their continued work, given me the privacy I had needed for the hour.
I set the kettle down at the threshold. I walked to the artifact’s pedestal and stood beside Ysolde. I waited for her to finish her conversation with the dreamer. She finished after perhaps another two minutes and turned to me with a small smile.
“Tobin.”
“Lass.”
“Thank ye for givin’ me the time.”
“Ye’re welcome, lass.”
“How was your tea?”
“The tea was fine, lass. I had it with some people.”
She nodded slowly. She understood, the way Ysolde always understood without needing explicit explanation. She squeezed my hand briefly. She went to go sit beside Balthazar.
I stood at the artifact. I looked at its soft pulsing violet light. I said, silently, in the interior voice:
Thank you, Dreamer. For permitting me the hour. For giving me a plaza and a bench. For allowing an old man to do his grandmother’s discipline one more time before the business of our return.
The artifact pulsed, once, in a slightly warmer register than its usual pulse. The dreamer had received the thanks. The dreamer had, in the small way of its communication, acknowledged them.
Good.
Friend, I will end this segment here. The rest of the afternoon was practical. We gathered our gear. We discussed the route of the return. We ascended the corridors. We passed the second ice-shield outward — which was much easier on the way out than on the way in, because the dreamer had accepted our visit and was now letting us go with blessing rather than testing. We passed the first ice-shield outward. We reached the surface. We made camp in the same hollow we had slept in the previous two nights. We ate supper. We slept.
But the segment is the plaza and the tea and the bench and Halda and Corwin and Mara, and that is the whole of what I have to say about the afternoon. An old man sat on a bench in a dead city and drank three cups of tea and remembered some ordinary people who had lived eight thousand years ago and were otherwise entirely forgotten. The remembering took one hour. The remembering produced no magical effect. The remembering was not recorded in any chronicle, except this one, and this one is a private chronicle, friend, that I am only dictating to you because the wider chronicler of the party — our Brother Aldric — has asked me to set down what I was doing while the others were doing their several things, and I am setting it down because Aldric has asked, and because a grandfather answers when the proper chronicler asks.
The sprig of rosemary still lies in the dry basin, I suspect. I did not go back to check. It will lie there, I hope, for a long time. Until some wind of the Vale’s recovery, in a century or two, stirs the dust and blows it away. By then, perhaps, the plaza will have grass growing in its corners and a small trickle of water returning to the fountain, and the sprig will have returned to earth. That is all right. The sprig was not the point. The sitting was the point. The tea was the point. The thinking of Halda and Corwin and Mara was the point.
The point is done. The remembering is recorded. The hour is closed.
I am Tobin. I am the grandfather of the party. I am the keeper of the kettle. I am, on occasion, the performer of my grandmother’s discipline. I have done my work for this afternoon. I am now ready to rest, to return to the surface, to face the Guild’s consequences, to see Pell again with the dreamer’s message for him, and to walk into whatever decades of the awakening I may yet be given to witness. Whatever I am given, I shall take with the same gratitude I took this hour’s tea.
Rest well, plaza. Rest well, named and unnamed dead. I will carry you with me, as long as my carrying lasts. Good afternoon.
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[…] Chronicle of the AncientsChapter Number: VIIChapter Title: “The Forsaken Vale and the Spectral Guardians” […]