Chapter 101: The Hearth King

[Day 3 of 40.]

Cassian Haskel announced his prices at noon, from the top of the gangway, like a man reading out the menu at an inn.

"One night by the fire costs one thing of value. Furs, food, a good blade, whatever you have." He smiled down at the twenty-odd frozen faces on the ice below him. "Or, for those of you who’ve brought nothing worth having, a vow. One year in the service of House Haskel, after the trial. I’m told my father pays very fairly!"

Nobody answered him, and the wind howled across the ice in their place.

Behind him, the brazier crackled at the top of the gangway, and the warmth from it rolled down the slope of the hull in a soft, visible shimmer. Aren could feel it from fifty paces away, and so could everyone else. He watched forty pairs of eyes go to it and stay there.

’He doesn’t even have to push. He only has to stand there and be warm.’

Kaela rode forward on the last horse until she reached the foot of the gangway.

"That ship belongs to the Crown," she told him flatly. "Everything inside the Hollow belongs to the Crown."

"With respect, Captain, your brother wrote the charter himself." Haskel leaned comfortably on the rail. "Inside the Hollow, the escort guards the candidates, but it doesn’t command them and it certainly doesn’t touch them." He tilted his head. "And it definitely doesn’t take their ships, unless the Throne would like to explain to my father why its soldiers laid hands on his son in the middle of his trial."

Kaela’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t move.

Haskel spread his hands, all pleasantness. "Iron answers merit, Captain. I got here first."

It went as Aren had known it would go.

The first to climb the gangway was a boy from a lesser house who had lost his gloves on the first night. He held out his sword, one of Haskel’s companions took it and stood aside, and the boy went up into the warm shimmer, sat down beside the brazier and began to cry.

After that it was easy. Two girls from House Merrow went up with nothing left to lose, then a boy who handed over his furs and climbed aboard shivering, which made no sense at all until you saw the fire. Last came a thin boy who had nothing whatsoever to give, and who stood at the top of the gangway with his mouth working until he managed to say the words out loud.

"One year. In the service of House Haskel."

"Lovely," said Haskel, and let him in.

By the middle of the afternoon there were nine of them on the ship and fifteen candidates left on the ice.

Freckles had held his belt the whole time. When the last one went up, she finally let go of it, and he could feel her looking at the fire.

"Go on, if you want," he told her quietly. "Nobody will think badly of you."

"I’d have to give him something."

"Yes, you would."

She considered it as she considered everything, with her freckled nose wrinkled up.

"I don’t want to give him anything," she decided at last. "He laughs wrong."

The merchant girl was standing beside them. One of Haskel’s companions had offered her a place, with great courtesy, in exchange for her furs, and she had looked at him in silence and then said nothing at all, which seemed to be how she said no. The Corvane twin stood a pace behind Aren and stubbornly refused to look at the ship, and Priest-boy was praying again.

Sigrid Varken could have walked up that gangway and been given the best place by the fire without paying a copper. Instead she stood a little apart from the rest of them with her hands in her sleeves, and she didn’t look at the ship either.

Ivo was looking at it, though.

He stood at the edge of the camp with his blue-grey face blank, and he wasn’t looking at the fire or at Haskel. He was studying the ship’s position on the ice, and how far it had traveled in the night.

"It walked him closer to the center," he murmured, half to himself. "And the lake let him sleep warm, and handed him a fire, and then gave him nine people." He paused. "This lake doesn’t give things away, fool."

"Then what is it doing?"

"Setting a table."

The third night came down fast, as all the nights did here, and the breathing came with it.

They stood in rings on the open ice a hundred paces from the ship, because Ivo flatly refused to let them closer and nobody felt like arguing with him. There were fifteen candidates, eleven soldiers, Ivo and Kaela, standing in rings of six with their shoulders touching and the outside swapping every fifty counts. Somebody told jokes. They were mostly the fool’s jokes, retold badly, and somehow that made them funnier.

Up on the ship the brazier glowed warmly, and somebody aboard was singing.

Aren stood on the windward side of his ring and let the Familiar eat.

He kept it to small bites, always small bites. It took the cold out of the air between their six bodies and no further, and every three hundred heartbeats, when the long slow breath rolled under the ice and pulled at them, it quietly took the worst of that too. Sigrid stood across from him and turned the rest aside, and between the two of them the inside of the ring was almost bearable.

The Familiar didn’t care much for bearable. It wanted the whole lake. Every wave that passed under them was a meal it wasn’t allowed to finish, and it tugged at its leash a little harder each time.

’Not tonight. Behave yourself.’

Around the fourth wave, he noticed Kaela.

She was walking the circle again, as she had every night, tapping shoulders and slapping faces and hauling up anyone who had slumped. She had been awake for three days now, and he could see it in how carefully she walked, as if the ice were further away than it looked. Her hands were wrapped in strips torn from a blanket, and the strips were dark where the rope had torn her palms open on the ship.

She didn’t stand in a ring herself. She was the captain, and the captain walked.

On her next round she stopped ten paces out, on the open ice between the rings and the dark, and stood there with her lance upright and her eyes fixed on the lake, watching the place where the Merrow girl had walked away.

The next wave came through and hit her alone.

Aren saw her sway, only slightly, before she straightened and stood as she had before. He knew from how stiffly she held herself afterward that it had cost her far more than it had cost anyone in the rings.

’She’ll stand there all night. She’ll stand there until it kills her, because she’s the one who threw the rope.’

He thought about it for perhaps three heartbeats, which wasn’t nearly long enough. It never was.

He let the Familiar off the leash a little further, but this time he didn’t send it toward the lake. He sent it toward her.

Ten paces was the very end of its reach. He felt the thread of cold stretch out of his side across the dark ice, thin and careful, until it found the space around her and began to drink. It didn’t touch the cold of the lake, only the cold that was reaching for her, so that when the next wave came through and rolled under her boots and pulled, there was nothing left there for it to take.

Kaela never noticed, which was the point.

But the Familiar could only eat so much at once, and every bite he sent across the ice to her was a bite he couldn’t take from around his own body. He kept the inside of the ring warm, and he let the cold have himself instead.

It came straight in through his furs as if they weren’t there. By the tenth wave his hands had stopped hurting, which was much worse than when they had hurt. By the fifteenth, his teeth were chattering so hard that the fool’s jokes came out in pieces, and Freckles was staring at him with her enormous eyes.

"You’re cold," she accused him.

"Fools have very thin blood."

"You said thick, before!"

"It changes. Count, please."

"Twenty-nine," the merchant girl said obligingly. "Thirty."

He stood on the windward side all night long and didn’t swap with anyone.

Dawn came grey, the breathing stopped, and Aren discovered that he couldn’t feel his feet at all.

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 5% → 8%.]

’Three percent for nearly freezing to death on purpose. I’m starting to understand how this lake works.’

The count came a few moments later.

Twenty-three.

"Twenty-three," they all answered at once, the ones on the ice and the ones on the ship together. One of the lesser-house boys who had refused to stand in a ring was lying a little way off with frost in his eyelashes, and the ice was already softening underneath him.

Nobody walked away this time, and Aren was almost proud of them.

Then the blue window opened in front of his face, so close and so bright in the grey morning that he nearly fell over backward.

[Investment recorded: Hidden aid. Warmth (Night 3).]

[Anchor progressed: Kaela Voss has stood a night of the Hollow’s breath alone.]

[Mirror Return triggered.]

A wheel spun in front of him, and it was small. It was much smaller than the one in the crack in the mountain and nothing like the Genesis Wheel on Awakening Day, with only three bands on it: x10, x20 and x50.

He frowned at it suspiciously.

’Hold on. She hates me as much as anyone can possibly hate anyone, and it’s sitting at a hundred percent. Shouldn’t that make it bigger?’

Another line appeared, one he had never seen before.

[Hostility opens the door. The cost decides the wheel.]

[Cost paid: one night of the Host’s warmth.]

[Wheel: Minor.]

Aren stared at it.

He thought about the biggest wheel he had ever spun, the one that had stopped on ten thousand. He had given almost everything he had that time, and he had always assumed the System was paying him for how much they hated him. It never had been. It had been paying him for how much it cost.

’So the hatred only gets me through the door, and after that it’s all about what I’m willing to lose. That’s a terrible system. That’s a terrible, terrible system!’

He thought about it a little longer.

’It’s also the fairest thing that’s ever happened to me.’

The pointer slowed in the wide band and settled firmly on x10.

[Result: x10.]

[Return: the Anchor’s vigil, x10.]

[Skill acquired: Sleepless Watch (Grade C).]

[Effect: The Host does not need sleep for up to five nights. After the fifth, the Host must sleep for one full day and cannot be woken.]

He went through the window word by word, to make sure he had understood it correctly. Then, in spite of his frozen feet and his dead hands and the boy lying in the ice twenty paces away, he nearly laughed out loud.

On a lake where sleep killed you, he had just been handed five nights of never needing it, with no cooldown and no cost while he used it, and nothing taken from anybody. The only price was a single day of sleep afterward, and it only came due after the fifth night.

’Finally. Finally, something that’s actually mine!’

When he looked up, Kaela was looking straight at him.

She stood on the ice where she had stood all night, ten paces out, with her lance upright and the frost thick on her shoulders. She looked tired, but not like a woman who had spent a whole night alone in the worst of the breathing. She glanced down at her own hands, at the bloody blanket strips, as though she were trying to work out why they weren’t frozen.

Then she looked across the ice at the fool, who was shaking so violently that his bell was ringing.

She didn’t say a word. She turned and walked off to check on her soldiers.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

’Still a hundred. Fine. It’s only the door.’

Haskel’s people came down from the ship an hour later to fetch firewood.

That was what he called it, leaning on the rail with his steaming cup. Two of his companions came down the gangway with axes, walked along the frozen hull to the stern, where the oldest planks had cracked open in the cold, and began to chop them out of the side of the ship.

Aren limped over to watch, because fools are curious by trade, and sat down on the ice twenty paces from the stern while Freckles rubbed his feet and scolded him. He was still swearing quietly under his breath when the first plank came free.

Iron Sense woke up on its own.

He could feel the nails in that plank, old iron, black and pitted, hammered in three hundred years ago. Under the iron, faint and slow and unmistakable, he felt the thing the skill always found: blood, bound to it. It wasn’t old, dead blood, either. It was moving, slower than a pulse should, but it was moving.

Aren stopped breathing.

He let Iron Sense open all the way, as he had on the first day, and felt the whole stern at once, hundreds of nails in hundreds of planks, the iron of the rudder and the bands around a broken spar. In every single nail he felt the same slow pulse and the same blood.

There were no soldiers frozen in the hold of that ship, because there didn’t need to be.

’Oh, gods. The crew never left. They are the ship!’

Up at the top of the gangway, one of Haskel’s companions tossed the first plank into the brazier.

The fire roared up, bright and grateful, and the people sitting around it sighed with pleasure and held out their hands.

And inside the flames, the plank closed its knots like eyes.