Chapter 193: Kindly

Vina was the first to move.

She dropped the core of her fruit and started down through the orchard toward the river. Rishin caught her by the hand before she had taken three steps, and she pulled against him like a pup on a lead.

"Together," said Rishin. "And slowly. A man who has been hungry that long does not like to be run at."

Vina stopped pulling. She did not let go of him again.

They went down to him all together.

The grain began where the first orchard ended. It came up to Logan’s waist, pale and dry and whispering, and the heads of it brushed his hands as he walked.

In the Silver, he had waded waist-deep through a thing that wanted to carry him off. This only bent out of his way and stood up again behind him.

Billy rolled ahead of them and laid a path through it. Sonic flew above, low enough to be heard.

"Left of the second orchard, Boss. Then straight on. He has not moved."

They passed the second orchard and then the third. Every row of trees was the same, round-headed and heavy with pale fruit. The smell of honey lay thick and sweet over all of it.

Logan found he was breathing through his mouth so that he would not have to smell it.

’He has been lying in that smell,’ he thought. ’Every sleep, with nothing he can eat.’

The river was wide and slow, and so clear that Logan could count the stones on its bed. The man sat where the last trees of the orchard came down to meet it.

He watched them come. He did not get up.

Close to, it was impossible to tell how old he was. He might have been forty or he might have been sixty, because hunger had worn away the difference.

His beard was matted, and his lips were split in three places. His eyes looked too big for the bones around them.

A sword in a plain leather scabbard lay across his knees. Both his hands rested on it, and they were the thinnest part of him.

The grass around him was covered with fallen fruit. None of it had been bitten.

"Do not pick anything for me," he said.

His voice was dry and thin, like a page being turned. He was looking at Vina.

"Please. I have watched it happen enough."

Vina had already picked one.

She had reached up with her free hand while he was speaking, the way she would have reached for an apple at home. Now she stood in front of him with the fruit held out on her palm.

The man looked at the fruit and then at her face. Logan saw him decide that he could not refuse her.

He took it from her hand and bit into it.

It went to ash in his mouth. He coughed, and grey dust came out between his split lips and caught in his beard. The fruit in his fingers went grey from the bite outward and crumbled into his lap.

Vina looked at her empty palm. There was grey dust on it.

"I meant it," she said. Her voice wobbled. "I did mean it."

"I know you did." The man wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. Then he reached out very slowly and brushed the dust from her fingers with his thumb.

"You meant it kindly," he said. "Kindly is not the same thing. Not on this layer."

Rishin put his hand on Vina’s shoulder. She leaned back against his legs and stayed there.

Helen knelt down in the grass in front of the man.

"May I?" she asked.

He looked at the green already gathering in her hands, and he nodded once.

[ Mending Spring ]

The light went into his chest like water into dry ground. Logan watched the splits in his lips close and the cracked skin around his eyes go smooth. The man’s breathing slowed and deepened.

But his shirt still hung from the points of his shoulders. His wrists were still the width of a broom handle.

Helen took her hands away and looked at them.

"It mends," she said. "It closed the cuts and eased his chest. It will not put anything into him."

"It was kind," said the man. His voice was a little stronger. "And that one, I could feel."

"Oswin," he said, when Alice asked his name.

Logan gave him theirs. Oswin repeated each one carefully, his lips moving, as if he were packing them away somewhere he could find them again.

When he came to Vina, he smiled. It split the newest scab on his lip, and he did not seem to notice.

"How long have you been here?" asked Daniel.

"Eleven sleeps." Oswin’s eyes went to the river. "I stopped looking at my panel. I did not like what it said."

"Without water," said Garen. He said it slowly.

"I was Tier-6 when I came in. It takes a long time for a Tier-6 to die of thirst." Oswin’s mouth twisted. "Longer than you would think, and much longer than you would want."

"Have you tried the fruit on the ground?" Alice asked. "The ones nobody picked?"

"I have tried those. I have tried biting them straight off the branch like a horse, with my hands behind my back." Oswin almost laughed. "This place knows the difference between a man and a horse."

His wife’s name was Lysa.

He told them about her without being asked, and once he had started, Logan did not think anything could have stopped him.

She had come in because he came in. They had crossed the Silver together. She had caught a fever on the Second Layer that would not break, and there had been a bottle for it on the first shelf behind a black door.

"I had two units," Oswin said. "I spent every day they had left at that counter, one after the other. I would do it again."

"And on the Third Layer?" asked Isolde.

"We held on." He turned his hands over on the scabbard and looked at them. "She was good at holding on. Better than me."

At the top of the stair, Lysa had sent him down first. She was slower than him, she said, and he was not to wait for her if she was slow. She had made him promise on the top step with her forehead against his.

"I waited anyway," said Oswin. "I stood at the bottom in the dark and listened. I heard her coming for nine turns. Then I stopped hearing her."

Alice’s hand had found Logan’s. He did not think she knew she had done it.

"The dark had me while I stood there," Oswin went on. "It got my legs to the knee. When it reached the knee, I remembered I had promised her. So I went."

He had walked the whole length of the Foot along the wall, alone, swinging his stone legs. A big thing had been breathing at the far end of it.

He had found the line by falling over it. When he got up, the grey was lying on the floor behind him in flakes.

"I turned round to go back for her," he said. "The line would not let me. It is like walking into a pane of glass. I tried it every sleep for the first three."

He looked up at Logan.

"Is it still there? The big one at the end of the Foot?"

"No," said Logan. "We killed it."

He could have stopped there. He looked at the man’s face and went on.

"It was made of people from the stair. The ones who did not come out. When it died, they all came apart, and they are standing in a ring at the bottom now. Each of them alone."

Oswin shut his eyes.

Logan thought of Garen’s shot bursting the arm of the colossus, and the stone forearm that had been a man’s body falling into the dark. He did not say that. Alice’s grip tightened on his fingers until it hurt.

When Oswin opened his eyes again, they were wet, but his voice was steady.

"Then if she is down there, she is standing by herself," he said. "Good. She would have hated being stuck to strangers."

Rishin had not spoken since the river.

He stood behind Vina with his hand on her shoulder, and he had been looking at Oswin the whole time. Now he looked away across the water.

"Is there a door on this layer?" he asked.

Oswin lifted one thin hand and pointed.

"There. Under the far bank, where the willows are. I have watched its lantern every sleep. It has never gone out."

"Did you go to it?"

"I went across on the second sleep, when I could still swim." Oswin’s hand dropped back onto the sword. "I had nothing to give it. My units were gone. I asked it to take my days instead, and it would not have them."

Rishin turned to Logan.

"I told you once," he said, "not to go through one of those doors unless somebody was dying."

He did not look back at Oswin. He did not have to.

Logan turned and looked across the river.

The far bank was low and green, and willows trailed their branches in the water along it. Under them, close to the waterline, there was a point of amber light the size of a candle flame.

He spoke into his collar.

"Pebble."