Chapter 102: Kindling

[Day 4 of 40.]

"The first stone doesn’t say people," Ivo murmured. "It says the dead."

He was sitting on his heels on the ice with his blue-grey hands hanging between his knees, and he didn’t look at the ship while he said it. He looked at the fool instead, as he had in the fragment hall, as though he were reading something written on the inside of his skull.

"You’re sure about the nails?"

"Every single one of them has the same blood and the same pulse." Aren kept his voice down. "It’s slow, but it’s there. Whoever built that ship is still inside it."

Ivo was silent for some time.

"Thirty years ago," he went on at last, "they found an old cart at the shore, frozen and half buried in the snow. Somebody broke it up for a fire on the second night." He rubbed his face wearily. "The account doesn’t say what happened next. It only says they never found the man who did it. They found his boots, still standing upright in the snow beside the ashes."

"Then we tell them."

"Tell Cassian Haskel that his firewood is alive?" Ivo laughed once, without any humor at all. "He’ll ask for proof, and the only proof you have is something a fool can’t possibly have."

’He’s right. The moment I say I can feel blood in iron, I stop being a fool.’

Aren thought it over. Then he stood up, straightened his cap until the bell hung just so, and walked toward the ship.

"Fool!" Ivo hissed after him. "What on earth do you think you’re doing?"

"My job!"

He didn’t go to the gangway. He went around to the stern, where the two companions from House Haskel were still chopping planks, and he stood there with his hands clasped behind his back, watching them with the grave attention of an old man supervising roadworks. Eventually they noticed him.

"What do you want?"

"Nothing at all!" the fool assured them. "I’m only admiring your courage."

"Our what?"

"Your courage." He nodded solemnly at the axe. "Chopping up a ship on a lake where the first law is don’t burn the dead! Most people wouldn’t dare. Most people would wonder who built a ship in the middle of a frozen lake, and where they all went." He beamed at them behind his mask. "But not you two. You’re very brave. I’m going to write a song about you afterward, a sad one."

The bigger of the two, a square-faced boy called Garret, laughed at him. The other one didn’t. He had stopped with the axe halfway up and was frowning at the plank in front of him.

"It’s wood," Garret said. "Look at it. It’s just wood."

"Oh, absolutely. Everybody knows the dead never use wood."

Up on the stern castle, the rail creaked.

Cassian Haskel was leaning on it with his cup, looking down at them. He had been standing there for some time, and although his smile was still in place, it had gone very thin at the edges.

"Is there something you’d like to say to me, fool?"

The square-faced boy stepped hastily back, and so did the other. The whole camp went quiet, every one of the twenty-odd people on the ice, and Aren could feel them listening.

"Only that it’s a beautiful fire, my lord," he called up brightly. "Very warm indeed. It would be a terrible shame if it turned out to be made of anybody."

Somebody on the ice laughed, a short, frightened laugh, stifled at once.

Haskel looked down at him in silence. His free hand had closed on the rail, and Aren watched the wood under his fingers begin to smoke before Haskel let go of it. He was a boy who had never once been laughed at in his life, and he wanted very badly to come down that gangway and do something about it.

He didn’t, though. Forty people were watching, and a fool was a man you didn’t hit, not in front of forty people, not even on a frozen lake at the end of the world.

"Get back to work," Haskel told his companions, without taking his eyes off the fool. "And somebody give the idiot a copper for his song."

A coin came spinning down from the rail. Aren caught it neatly on his forehead, fell over backward, and lay on the ice with his legs waving in the air until a few more people laughed.

When he sat up again, Haskel had gone from the rail. The second companion, the one who had stopped chopping, was still standing with the axe hanging from his hand, staring at the plank.

He put the axe down. Then he walked to the gangway, went up it, said something low to the two people sitting nearest the brazier, and came back down again with both of them following him.

Nobody stopped them, and nobody said a word.

They walked straight across the ice to the rings, and the boy who had held the axe went directly to Sigrid Varken.

"Is it true?" he asked her urgently. "What the fool said just now. Is it true?"

Sigrid studied him with her pale Varken eyes. Then she looked at the ship, and then, for the briefest moment, at the fool sitting in the snow brushing off his cap.

"Yes."

The boy let out a long breath that steamed in the air.

"My name’s Jory. I don’t have anything left to pay with. Can I stand in your ring?"

"Count when it’s your turn," Sigrid told him, "and don’t close your eyes."

[Day 4 of 40. Night.]

It was the first night he didn’t need to sleep.

He felt it the moment the dark came down, a weight lifted off a pack he had forgotten he was carrying. The cold still bit and the breathing still pulled at them, but the long grey heaviness behind his eyes, the thing that had been pressing on him since the first night, had vanished.

[Sleepless Watch: Night 1/5.]

So he watched.

He stood on the windward side of the ring with Freckles and Jory and Priest-boy and the merchant girl and the Corvane twin, with Sigrid across from him, and he kept his eyes fixed on the ship.

There were six people aboard now. Haskel’s two remaining companions sat around the brazier with the boy who had sold a year of his life and the two Merrow girls, while Haskel himself stayed in his cabin at the top of the stern castle, with a line of warm light glowing around the door.

The fire burned all night. It burned even brighter than it had the night before, and every so often one of them stood up and fed it another plank, and the others sighed and stretched out their hands.

At the ninth wave, Garret fed it.

He was the last one still awake. The others had fallen asleep around the brazier in the warmth, curled up together, and he got up, stretched, yawned, picked up a long plank from the pile and dropped it carelessly into the fire.

The fire went white.

It didn’t burn brighter; it turned white, and for one heartbeat the top of the gangway was lit up like noon. Every person on the ice turned to look, and Aren saw it plainly from a hundred paces away.

The planks of the deck around the brazier were moving!

They didn’t break apart. They bent, smooth and unhurried, as easily as softened willow. The long boards of the deck lifted up around Garret’s feet and curled over them like closing fingers. He looked down and kept looking, as if he couldn’t understand what he was seeing, and then he started to pull.

He didn’t scream, although Aren had expected him to. He only pulled harder and harder, with his face going red in the white firelight, while the deck held his boots and wouldn’t let go, and the wood crept steadily up his shins and past his knees, smooth and patient and grey.

The others around the brazier were waking up now. One of the Merrow girls screamed loudly enough for both of them. Somebody grabbed Garret by the arms to drag him free, and let go when the wood began to climb toward his own hands too.

Cassian Haskel’s door slammed open. He came out onto the stern castle with heat pouring off him in waves, took in what was happening, and threw his whole power down at the deck in one great roaring blast that turned the air to shimmer.

The deck didn’t burn at all.

It soaked up the heat greedily. It drank every bit of it, and then it moved faster.

By the time the wood reached Garret’s chest, he had stopped pulling. He stood with his arms at his sides, looking out across the dark toward the center of the lake, and his face had gone calm.

Then the wood closed over his face, and there was nobody standing at the top of the gangway anymore. There was only a new knot in the deck beside the brazier, round and dark and roughly the size of a man’s head.

The fire went back to its ordinary color.

Nobody on the ice made a sound, and nobody on the ship did either. After a while Aren heard somebody up there crying, and he thought it was the boy who had sold his year.

Freckles was clutching his belt so hard it hurt.

"Count," he told her gently. "Please."

"Thirty-one," said Jory, in a strange flat voice. "Thirty-two."

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 8% → 10%.]

They all came down at dawn.

The two Merrow girls came first, without their furs, which they had paid. Then came the boy who had sold his year, and last of all Haskel’s companions, walking stiff-legged and refusing to look at anyone. They walked straight across the ice to the rings and stood awkwardly at the edge of them, unsure of their welcome.

Kaela looked them over from the back of her horse.

"Rings of six," she told them at last. "Shoulders touching. Swap every fifty." She paused. "And don’t burn anything."

The count came, and everybody answered.

Twenty-two.

Only one person stayed on the ship.

Cassian Haskel stood at the rail of the stern castle with no cup in his hand this time, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. He was looking at the rings on the ice and the people who had abandoned him, and at the fool sitting at the edge of the nearest ring with his hands tucked under his arms for warmth.

Aren didn’t need Iron Sense to know what was in that look.

’There it is. I’ve just taken his kingdom away from him with a song about firewood, and he’ll never forgive me for it.’

He found that he didn’t mind very much.

When the light was good enough, he walked around the ship to the bow by himself and looked up at the carving there.

He had seen it on the day they arrived: a ring of figures holding hands, worn smooth by three hundred years of ice, with the plain round circle carved in the middle of them, empty. He had counted the figures without meaning to, since he counted everything now, and there had been twelve.

Now there were thirteen.

The new figure was rougher than the others, its wood paler and its edges still sharp. It was a square-faced boy standing with his arms held out to either side, holding hands with the figures next to him, and its face was calm.

Aren stared up at it without moving. Then he looked further along the ring, and his stomach turned over.

Right beside the square-faced boy, between his hand and the next figure’s, there was a gap in the ring. It wasn’t a broken piece. It was a space carved deliberately, smooth and clean, with a wooden hand reaching into it from either side and waiting for someone to take hold.

It was smaller than the others, and thinner, the size of somebody very young or somebody who hadn’t eaten properly in weeks.

Behind him, at the edge of the rings, Priest-boy had started to pray again.