Chapter 659: Hold

The water in the well began to rise.

It did not surge. It swelled, the way it had swelled in the crack beneath the Glacial Palace: slowly, smoothly, without a sound, the black surface lifting toward the ledge as though something enormous far below had drawn a breath and the whole sea was being pushed up ahead of it. The green lamps in their niches flickered. A long, low groan went through the pale stone of the dome, and a crack opened in the wall above the archway and began, very gently, to weep seawater.

The people of the Court did not run. They pressed themselves back against the walls, pale and silent, as if they had always known this moment would come.

Corin’s note was still going. It was thin and high and terrified, and it was nowhere near enough.

"It’s waking," said Nyx.

Her eyes had gone opal. She was standing at the edge of the ledge with both hands at her sides, looking down into the rising black.

"Not all the way. It’s dreaming that it’s waking." Her voice was strange and distant. "It’s dreaming about the light. It’s dreaming it’s nearly there."

There was no time to think. Vane looked at them all and knew where each of them had to be.

"Isole. Wren."

Isole was already moving. She went down on her knees beside the old woman on the ledge and put both palms flat against her narrow back, and Samsara came up out of her, light and dark together, so bright that it lit the whole dome gold and grey. Wren gasped.

"Isaac. The walls."

"I’m tired," Isaac said, and put his hands flat against the weeping crack above the archway, and the water froze. Frost spread out across the pale stone in both directions, sealing the crack and the next one and the next.

"Ashe."

Ashe did not need telling. She put her new sword point-down into the stone of the ledge and leaned on it, and let her weight go into the floor, the way she had in the Kiln. Vane felt it go out through the whole dome: through the ledge and the walls and the long curve of the roof, every stone suddenly carrying her. The groaning eased.

"Valerica. The water."

Valerica stood at the edge of the well with her hands open in front of her, and her face perfectly calm, and the Celestial Heart settled in her chest, heavy and steady. She did not reach for the rising sea. She simply became something for it to fall toward. The black water slowed. It did not stop. But it slowed.

"Nyx."

Nyx looked at him. Her eyes were opal all the way through.

"I can go into the dream," she said. "I can try to turn it. Make it dream it’s cold. Make it dream it’s deep." She swallowed. "But it’s so big, Vane. If I go in that far, I don’t know if I’ll find the way out."

"I’ll hold you," said Vane.

He went and stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. And through the Usurper, through the Dreamscape he had carried from her for years, he anchored her. A rope tied to a post.

Nyx closed her eyes and went down into the dark.

The water was still rising, slower, but rising. And Corin’s note was still too thin.

Then, behind him, Vane heard Ormond.

The Master-at-Arms had come forward to the edge of the well with his good hand raised, palm out, the way he had stood on the river road. His face was grey.

"There’s a space," Ormond said quietly. "Between waking and moving. It’s very wide in something this large." He drew a breath. "I’ve spent my life closing spaces."

And he bound it.

Vane felt it happen. The Sovereign Binding went down into the well like a hand closing on a breath, down and down past the green lamplight and into the dark, toward the thing that was dreaming it was waking. It reached the half-second between the dream and the motion, the space where the great slow body below them was deciding to rise, and held it shut.

The water stopped.

Ormond made a sound like a man lifting something far too heavy. Blood ran from his nose. He did not lower his hand.

"I can’t hold it long," he said through his teeth. "Someone sing."

Corin’s voice was breaking. Vane could hear it. The boy was crouched on the ledge with his knees pulled up and his arms around them and his eyes squeezed shut, holding the note with everything he had, and it was wavering, wavering, about to go.

Then Mara sat down beside him.

She did not say anything. She simply sat on the stone next to him, very close, and took his hand, and put her other hand flat on his back between his shoulders. And she began to count. Under her breath, steady and even, the way she counted marks in her ledger at night. In, two, three. Hold. Out, two, three. In.

Corin’s breathing caught on the rhythm. Slowed. Steadied.

His note steadied with it.

"There," said Mara softly. "That’s it. Again."

And Corin, ten years old, frightened, with his feet in the sea and a girl he had never met holding his hand, opened his eyes, and looked down into the black water, and sang.

The thinness went out of it. It came out of him low and full and certain, and it went out across the well and down into the dark and the dark answered it. Beside him, Wren Calloway lifted her head. Isole’s hands were still on her back, and Samsara was still burning gold and grey, and the old woman took a breath and found the note again, under Corin’s, deep and slow and steady as she had held it for eighty years. Two ropes on the same post.

And through his hands on Nyx’s shoulders, very far down, Vane felt the dream begin to turn.

He felt Nyx in it, small and bright and stubborn, standing in the middle of something vast and warm and slow, telling it a story about cold. About deep water and quiet and dark. About sleep. And the thing listened, the way something very large listens to something very small, without understanding, because the voice was soft and the song was steady and it had been listening to that song for three hundred years.

Slowly, slowly, it stopped dreaming of the light.

The water in the well sank. It went down past the ledge, and down further, and the black surface went still and flat and smooth as glass. The groaning in the dome stopped. Frost glittered on the sealed cracks in the walls.

Ormond lowered his hand, and went down onto his knees on the stone, and stayed there.

Nyx’s eyes went dark again. She sagged back against Vane’s chest, and he caught her and held her, and felt her shaking.

"I found the way out," she whispered. "You were holding the door."

For a long time nobody spoke. There was only the singing: two voices now, one very old and one very young, going on together into the quiet.

When Corin finally let his note fall, Wren held it alone for a while, and then let her own go too, very gently, and the great dome was silent.

Nothing stirred in the well. Against the wall, Ysra let out a breath that seemed to have been held for forty years.

"Deep," she said. "It’s gone deep. Deeper than I’ve felt it since I was a girl."

Corin turned his head and looked at Mara, who was still holding his hand.

"I want to go home," he said. His voice was hoarse. "I want to see my mum." He looked down at the water. "And then I want to come back. When I’m bigger. When I can choose."

"Then you will," said Mara, as if it had been written down.