Chapter 656: Freely Given

They argued about it for three days, which was how Vane knew it mattered.

They did not argue in the usual way. Nobody raised their voice. Nobody stormed out onto the deck, because there was nowhere on the Lark to storm to. They simply came back to it, over and over, at meals and on watch and in the dark of the cabin at night, the way a tongue keeps going back to a broken tooth.

"It worked," Valerica said, on the first evening. She had the Meridian’s log open on her knees, though she must have known it by heart by now. "That’s the part none of us wants to say. For three hundred years, it worked. Nine voices, and the sea stayed down. How many people lived because of that? Millions?"

"Nine children," said Isole.

"Not all of them were children. The log doesn’t give ages for most of them."

"It gives one." Isole did not look up from the bandage she was rolling. "A girl from the Marrin valley, eleven. That’s the first name on the list. Eleven, Valerica. Edda’s age."

Valerica said nothing for a while.

"I’m not defending it," she said at last. "I’m saying that if we go out there and break it, we’d better have something to put in its place. Because if we don’t, the next thing that comes ashore won’t care whose fault it was."

On the second day, it was Ashe.

She had been quiet since the Meridian, sitting in the middle of the deck with her new sword across her knees, and when she finally spoke, it was to Isaac, who had been reading the log over Valerica’s shoulder for an hour.

"Where I come from," she said, "when the Empire came east, four hundred years ago, our people burned their own fields. Their own towns. So the Empire would have nothing to take." She ran her thumb along the flat of the blade. "They called it a sacrifice. The songs still call it that. Every child in the east learns them." She looked up. "Nobody ever asks the people who were standing in the fields."

Isaac closed the book slowly.

"Mother would say it’s not the same," he said. "That a sacrifice that saves the world is different from one that only loses a war."

"Would she?"

He was quiet for a moment.

"No," he admitted. "She’d say it, and then she’d go down to the ice by herself every night for three months rather than ask anyone else to stand there with her." He set the book down. "I don’t think she believes it either. I think she just doesn’t know what else to do."

On the third night, it was Nyx, and it was very late, and she said it so quietly that only Vane heard.

"I touched it," she said. "In the north. Under the ice." She was lying against him in the dark with her head on his chest. "It’s not a monster, Vane. Not the way we mean it. It’s just very big, and very old, and asleep, and it wants to be warm. That’s all it wants." A long pause. "When I was in the Dark World, I used to think that about the things that hunted us. That they weren’t cruel. That they just didn’t know we were there." She was silent for so long he thought she had fallen asleep. "It didn’t make it better. Knowing."

He did not answer. He did not have an answer.

He lay awake a long time after she slept, listening to the panes ring in the wind and the soft sounds of the others breathing in the dark, and thought about it the way he had been thinking about it for three days.

Freely given. That was what the log said. That was the price the Eighth had asked, and the Accord had agreed. One voice in each generation, freely given.

He thought about the first name on the list. A girl from the Marrin valley, eleven.

He thought about Corin, who hummed when he was frightened.

In the morning, at breakfast, he said it.

"An eleven-year-old can’t freely give forever."

Everyone looked up.

"That’s the whole problem," Vane said. "Not the voice. Not even the sea. Nobody that age can say yes to that. They don’t know what they’re saying yes to. So it was never freely given. Not once. Not in three hundred years." He set down his cup. "That’s the part we break. Not the singing. The part where it’s a child, and the part where it’s forever."

Valerica looked at him for a long moment.

"And the singing?"

"We find another way to pay for it."

"With what?"

"I don’t know yet." He met her eyes. "The Accord’s back. Isadora’s on her ice. Bastien’s smiths are pouring fire into his mountain. Ilario’s astronomers have been watching the sea for thirty years. None of them would let a child do it alone." He shrugged. "Neither will I."

Nobody said anything.

Then Ashe nodded once, as though something had been settled, and went back to her breakfast. Isole reached over and put her hand on his wrist, briefly. Nyx, half asleep against the wall, murmured, "Good," and closed her eyes again. And Valerica took out a fresh sheet of paper, uncapped her pen, and wrote across the top of it, in her neat hand, Terms.

They crossed the Hesket shelf on the seventh day out from the Meridian, and saw the Emperor.

They saw him from a very long way off, which was the only way anyone should ever see him. The Lark was flying high and fast over the edge of the shelf, where the water turned from shallow grey-green to the deep slate of the open Abyss, and Sarai Vell suddenly put her hand flat on the helm and said, in a voice Vane had never heard from her, "Down. Everyone. Below the rail."

They went down.

Far to the south, perhaps twenty miles away across the water, two great ships of the line lay at anchor, their sails furled. Between them, floating in the sea, was something that Vane at first took for an island.

Then it caught the light, and he saw that it was dark and curved and glistening, and it went on for half a mile, and along its length, very faintly, he could see the pale shapes of ribs. A long scar ran down the whole of one side, as clean as a cut in paper.

Standing on top of it, very small, was a single man.

Vane did not reach for the Usurper. He would not have dared. He did not need to. Even from twenty miles, even below the rail of a small ship in the wind, he could feel the Domain the way you feel the sun on your face with your eyes closed: vast, and calm, and utterly uninterested in anything as small as a boat.

The man on the carcass did not turn. He was looking down at the thing beneath his feet with his hands in his pockets, the way a man looks at a large fish he has caught and is wondering whether it is the one he was after.

Then the Lark was past, and the carcass sank below the horizon behind them, and Sarai Vell let out a long, slow breath and took her hand off the helm.

"Well," said Nyx faintly. "He’s having a good time."

Nobody laughed. But on the eleventh morning out from the shelf, the sea beneath them turned a deep, clear, impossible green, and they stopped thinking about the Emperor at all.