Chapter 557: The Journey Downwards

Light organised us inside an hour, and it was the most humiliating hour of my recent life.

He put the big one at the front with a length of bone he had sharpened into something, because a big man at the front makes everyone behind him walk faster. He put Bren second.

The young one went in the middle where he could be reached from two sides. The wyvern took the flank on its good leg. Devant went wherever he wanted and nobody argued about it.

He put me at the back with Ilse, because a man carrying somebody is no use to anyone in a fight.

"You’re enjoying this."

He tightened a strap across the young one’s chest without looking up.

"I am enjoying doing something correctly for the first time in a month. Yes."

The fourth one, the one who had been at the wall, walked between Bren and the big man with a hand on each of his arms. He walked when they walked. He stopped when they stopped. He had said nothing since he opened his eyes and I was starting to accept that he might not.

Then we went down.

The first hour is your arms, so you plan around your arms. You switch grips and you rest at intervals and you feel quite clever about it.

The second hour is your lower back. The third is your knees.

By the fourth my hands had stopped holding and started hooking, and I could feel the moment coming when they would open on their own with nothing I could do about it.

Light took her from me before that happened. He did it without being asked and without saying anything, which was decent of him and which I resented enormously.

I walked beside them with my fingers shaking and a red groove across both palms where her weight had ridden, and I watched Ilse’s head loll against a man she has never liked.

’...This is fine.’

We covered less ground than we should have. Devant told us so twice, in the tone of a man reading a number off a wall.

Around what we had started calling evening, which meant the point where the young one began stumbling into people, we found a shelf of rock with a wall at its back and stopped there.

Light got a fire going out of nothing. I still do not know what he burned.

I sat with Ilse’s head on my thigh and did the only medicine available to me, which was water and talking nonsense at her.

Her breath came out cold across my knuckles.

I put my hand flat on her sternum and left it there a long while. A month ago that woman melted the ice off my sleeve with one exhale, and there was nothing coming up through my palm now at all.

’She’s colder than this morning...’

Across the fire, Bren was showing the young one how to fold a coat so it stopped being a coat and started being a pillow. The big man sat with his back to all of us and ate what he had been given without any sign of tasting it.

Devant sat apart with his knees up.

"Everybody stops."

I looked over.

"Sorry?"

"Down here." He was watching the fire and not me. "There is always a thing a person could do that would make it easier. Eat the animal. Turn back. Leave the ones who slow you. Everyone knows the thing, and then, about this deep, they stop doing it. And they do not notice they have stopped. They have very good reasons and the reasons are all different and they are all wrong."

Bren had gone still with the coat half folded in her hands.

"What does that mean?"

The boy shrugged and reached for his cup.

"Sentiment. Ignore me. People are simply weak, that is all it is."

He had said the opposite one breath earlier, and he put it down the way you put a plate back on a shelf, and Bren looked at me for a translation I did not have.

Light watched him over the fire and said nothing, and later that night he moved his blanket so that he slept between the boy and the rest of us.

I filed the whole thing under this one is mad and let it go.

Later, when the fire had gone to embers and the others were down, I got up.

I told myself I was checking the perimeter, which is a thing I have never once done in my life. I went out past the shelf into the dark, far enough that the light behind me was a suggestion, and I stood with my back to the rock and my heart going in a way that had nothing to do with fear.

’Twenty minutes.’

That is the last clear thing I have from it.

The next clear thing is my hands in the water of a seep about sixty feet from where I had been standing, washing them, which they did not need. Cold water to the wrists. Grit under my nails coming loose and going away downstream. I could not have told you how long I had been doing it.

’Wren.’

I’m here.

’How long was I out there?’

A while.

’Did I—’

No.

Cade. I am not going to make a joke about this. I have made a joke every time it has come up and I am not going to now. You have tried four times since the flood. Four times you have come back doing something else. Once you came back with an armful of firewood.

’I keep thinking I will do it in a minute...’

That is not a reason. That is the sound a reason makes.

I stood there with my hands dripping.

It was never shame. I have been laughed at by an empress and I have negotiated with a woman while she had my cock in her fist, and shame has never once stopped me doing anything.

I go to the thought and the thought slides. It is like putting your hand out for a door handle in the dark and finding wall. Every time. And the strange part is not the wall, it is that after a few seconds I stop looking for the handle and go and do something else, and I am not upset about it.

’That’s not me.’

I went back to the fire.

Ilse was where I had left her. I got down beside her and put my hand on her sternum again and waited a long time for something that did not come.

Devant was awake. He was always awake. He watched me sit down and said nothing at all about where I had been, and I have decided that was the most tactful thing anyone has done for me since I fell into this hole.

Then, quietly, without looking over:

"Nine days."

I frowned at him across the coals.

"You said eleven. This morning you said eleven, and we walked all day."

The boy smiled at the fire.

"So I did."

He lay down and went to sleep. I sat up the rest of the night with my hand on a woman going cold under it, running numbers that would not come out the same way twice, and in the morning we got up and walked, because that is all there was to do.