Chapter 138: Barefooted

Sesan did not stop when he shouted her name.

She was already off the last porch board and onto what had been lawn. The grass there had gone the colour of old tea, and it broke when she put her weight on it. His burnt-sleeved hoodie hung off her the way it had hung off her in the doorway. Her feet were bare. The frost in her hair did not melt. It just sat there and made the air around her look wrong.

The thing sixty feet off the porch was still open.

Purple, but not quite light, and not quite a wound either. It sat in the air the way a held breath sits in a chest, and the dead grass ran up to it in a clean circle, every blade brown to the root and nothing green left inside the line.

"Sesan—"

Estea’s voice came from the rail behind him, low and level, the same voice she used when she assigned rooms:

"Don’t you run at her. And don’t you put a hand on her wrist. She is not a door you get to shut. You go beside her. You do not haul a woman off her own feet in front of that."

Uthed was on the step where the standing order had put him. The sword he would not draw because the order had not been rescinded. His mouth was a line, and it barely moved when he spoke:

"I can come."

Theo did not look back to make it kinder.

"You can’t."

Asterion’s people were a dark stitch in the trees at forty yards. Nobody had told them to hold. Nobody had told them they could come in. Asterion himself had one boot on the edge of the burned circle and the other still in living ground, and he did not move the second one. His head tracked Sesan the way a man tracks weather.

Theo went down the steps.

The dead grass cut at the soles of his shoes, and heat came up through it that was not heat. His darkness leaned. It had been leaning since he came home, and now it leaned harder, toward the purple, the way water leans toward a crack in a bowl.

Sesan did not look at him.

She walked the way she had walked to the Forest Spirit, in no hurry and with no fear that he could use. The hoodie sleeve had slipped off one thin shoulder, and he could see the place at the base of her neck where the frost lived under the skin.

[Warning: Constitution reversion accelerating]

[The Frozen Sea: 11.4% → 11.7%]

He made a sound he did not choose.

From the rail, Estea said:

"I see it. You will see it later. You will not see it if you do something stupid now."

"What am I not doing."

"You are not going through it. You are not putting your Class in it to see what it does. You are not asking that elf what it smells like. You are walking next to your wife and you are letting her do the thing she has already decided to do, and if you cannot stand that you will come back up these steps and I will not think less of you."

He thought less of himself for the half-second he considered it.

He caught Sesan at twenty feet.

He did not take her wrist. Instead he put himself on her left, in the place a person stands when they are not sure whether they are a wall or a witness. She did not slow. The purple threw no shadow, and that was the first thing that made his hands go cold. Everything threw a shadow. His Class had opinions about things that did not.

Quieter, he tried again:

"Sesan. Look at me."

She looked at the purple instead.

Up close it was not purple so much as the idea of purple. The air along its edge crawled. He could see the porch through it, and then he could not, and then he could see a dark that was not the dark on this side. His darkness reached for that other dark and came back with nothing it could name.

Sesan lifted her hand.

He could have stopped her. He had the angle and he had the strength, and he had spent a year learning how to put his body where a wife’s body was about to be. He could have lifted her off the grass and carried her up the steps, let Estea call him a prick for it, and been right in the only way that kept a panel from climbing.

He let her.

Strategy would have been the lift. Strategy would have been Asterion’s forty yards and Uthed’s order and the thing on the other side of a door that did not have a category. He let her because she was his wife, and because she had come out of the house in his hoodie without asking. And because the last time he had put a locked door between her and what she wanted, he had had to talk her through a seizure on a cabin floor.

Her palm met the purple.

There was no sound.

The frost under her skin ran out along her fingers as if it had been waiting for a surface, and the crawling edge went still.

For one stupid second he thought it had accepted her, the way a lock accepts a key it was cut for.

Then the purple went out.

Not like a lamp. Like a mouth closing.

The air where it had hung clapped in on itself and left a smell of wet stone and old cold. The dead circle of grass did not green. It just stopped being a circle that led anywhere.

Sesan stood with her hand in empty air.

Then her knees went.

He had her before she hit. She was light, all hoodie and bone, and the hoodie was warm and her skin was not. The frost in her hair had spread a finger-width down toward her temple, and her eyes were open and not seeing the porch.

[Warning: Constitution reversion accelerating]

[The Frozen Sea: 11.7% → 12.3%]

[Source: contact]

[Duration of contact: 2.1 seconds]

Estea did not raise her voice:

"Inside."

The word carried the way her assignments carried.

Theo got a shoulder under Sesan and stood. By then Asterion had come off the line without being told and stopped again at ten yards with both hands empty, watching the place in the air where the purple had been as if it might remember itself. Without taking his eyes off it, he said:

"It is shut."

"I can see it’s shut."

Asterion answered without pity:

"You cannot see that it is shut. You can see that it is not open. Those are not the same work."

Uthed had not left the step. His splinted hand was on the rail, and his other hand was on the place a man puts a hand when he wants a sword and has been told not to have one. He called across the grass:

"Bring her here. The old man is in the kitchen. He came for the girl downstairs. He is still here."

Theo took the steps one at a time. Sesan’s head was against his collarbone, and he would not jolt her to look like a man in a hurry. Odette had the door. She did not ask if he needed help. She took the weight of the door.

Estea had turned the chair. She was at the rail with both hands on the wood, and the look on her face was not triumph and it was not fear. It was the look she wore when a fact had arrived and she was deciding whether the fact was allowed to be spoken in this house.

Theo stopped on the top step with his wife in his arms, the dead grass behind him and the place in the air that was only air.

"Say it."

Estea’s mouth flattened.

"Because if I say it and I am right, you will go into it."

"It’s shut."

"That is why you will go into it. You are a cheap steak and you think a shut thing is a thing that is finished. It is not a Gate, Theo."

The rail creaked under her hands.

"It is an aperture. There’s a difference between the two."