Chapter 116: Heroes of the North

[Day 37 of 40.]

He freed three on the twenty-sixth night and three more on the twenty-seventh.

It was easy now, or at least much easier! At fifty-two percent he could see the edges of a verse the moment he touched it, sharp and clear, just as he had once seen the weak side of a man in a fight. The Familiar went in where he pointed, took the song and nothing else, and came back to him like a dog that had finally learned its name.

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 52% → 55%.]

The Merrow cousin was the last of the candidates. One of Kaela’s soldiers was the last of the soldiers. When they were done, he sat back on his heels in the hold and looked at the one sleeper left.

Freckles lay against the far wall with her knees drawn up, humming.

He had saved her for last on purpose, because she was the smallest and the youngest and he wanted every percent he could get before he touched her. Now he knelt beside her and laid his palm flat on her chest, very gently, and listened.

The verse was there, curled behind her heart like all the others.

Then he felt where it went.

It didn’t stop at her. The other verses had been small closed things, coils of song wound tight inside one body. This one had a root. It ran out of her back, through the planks of the hull and down into the ice, thin as a hair and taut as a fishing line, and it went on going, down and down and away across the lake toward the center.

Toward the ring.

He pulled his hand back slowly.

’She isn’t one of his verses. She’s the end of his thread.’

If he took the song out of her, he would have to take the whole thread with it, every mile of it, all the way down to whatever was holding the other end. He thought about the map in his shirt. The fifth sleeps under the ring. The girl goes with it.

"I can’t yet," he whispered to her. "I’m sorry. Soon."

Freckles went on humming, and somewhere very far away, he thought he heard someone laugh.

On the twenty-ninth day, he kept his promise to Sigrid.

He took her and Ivo down into the captain’s cabin of the ship, where nobody could hear, and laid the Crown’s letter on the table between them. He didn’t say anything. He simply unfolded it and let them read.

To the warden of the Hollow trial. Forty days, as before. Let it feed. Do not intervene. Bring home whoever is left standing, and record their names as heroes of the North.

Ivo read it three times. Aren watched his face as he did, and on the third time something in it broke quietly and didn’t mend.

"As before," the scout said at last. His voice was very calm. "As before."

"Your brother," Sigrid said softly.

"My brother, and my father’s cousin, and the Haldane boys, and every name on the wall in the Hall of the North." Ivo put his finger on the seal, the crowned tower, and held it there. "They’re painted in gold, you know. Heroes of the North. My mother goes to look at my brother’s name every winter solstice."

Nobody spoke, and the old ship creaked around them in the cold.

"Where did you find this?"

"On a Crown officer, in the Barracks. He’d been dead eight or nine years." Aren folded the letter and put it back inside his shirt. "I think somebody sent him in to check that the lake was still hungry, and the lake decided he was supper too."

Sigrid was staring at the place on the table where the letter had been.

"What do we do?"

’That’s the right question. I wish I had a good answer.’

He counted them anyway, because he always did. Fifty candidates had walked onto the ice, and sixteen were still breathing. Five of Kaela’s soldiers, Kaela herself and Ivo made twenty-three.

"We stay alive," he said. "All of us. Every person on this ship and every person on that rock. On the fortieth day, the convoy comes, and they expect to find a handful of frozen survivors who’ll cry and thank them and go home to be heroes." He tapped his shirt, where the letter sat. "Instead, they’ll find twenty-three people who know exactly what the Crown sent them here to do. With proof."

"They’ll kill us!"

"They’ll want to. But twenty-three is a lot of people to lose on the way home, when your whole court is expecting heroes." Aren shrugged. "And I’m very hard to kill."

Ivo stared at him, the fool in the cracked mask with the bell on his cap, and then, very slowly, he started to laugh. It was a dreadful sound, and it went on until his eyes were wet.

"Nine years," he managed, wiping them. "Nine years I’ve been mapping this place, so that the next ones would live. And it never once occurred to me that the map was the wrong thing to draw."

[Ivo Varken. Hostility: 18% → 5%.]

They spent the next week getting ready.

Ivo marked every safe path between the ship, the rock and the iron ring on the backs of his old maps. Sigrid moved the freed candidates out of the hold and onto the deck, where they could see the sky, and drilled them every morning with whatever weapons they had. Jory turned out to be useful with Stone Skin when he wasn’t trying to crush anyone. Tessa could put a Frost Needle through a hanging ring at twenty paces. The Corvane twin barely spoke, but he never left the rail, and he never missed a watch.

"You’re doing it wrong," Tessa informed the fool on the second morning, watching him try to throw a knife at the mast. It bounced off the wood and skidded across the deck.

"I’m a fool. I’m supposed to do it wrong."

"You walked into a whiteout and came back with the weather in your pocket!" She picked up the knife, flipped it once, and put it through the mast at the height of a man’s eye. "You can stop pretending with us, you know."

"I really can’t," Aren said, and for once, it wasn’t part of the act.

She studied him, then shrugged and went back to her ring. But that evening she taught Jory to throw, and the next evening Jory taught the Corvane twin, and by the end of the week there were nine people on the deck who could hit a mast, and a fool who still couldn’t, very deliberately.

Aren went out alone every day and walked the ice around the iron ring.

He didn’t go into it. He walked its edge, slowly, with Iron Sense spread out under the ice as far as it would go, and learned it as he had once learned the streets of the Furnace. The ring was huge, a thousand paces across, black iron buried deep. In its center, far past anything Iron Sense could reach, the Familiar kept turning toward something under the ice: a hollow.

And in the hollow, something slept.

He couldn’t feel its shape. He could only feel its breath, very slow and very deep, once every few minutes, and on every breath, the thread from Freckles’ back went tight.

’Whatever that is, it’s bigger than a lung. Much bigger.’

On the thirty-third day, Kaela came down from the rock again.

She didn’t come to the ship. She stood at the edge of the iron ring, two hundred paces from where he was walking, and watched him circle it. She did that every day after, at a distance, and she never spoke a word to him. Sometimes Brenner stood beside her. Sometimes she was alone.

He didn’t like it at all!

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 94%.]

[Ward of Zero: Ready.]

On the thirty-seventh night, the frozen soldiers knelt.

He was on deck when it happened, and so was everyone else, because nobody on the lake was sleeping much anymore. It started in the west, far out on the ice, a ripple running through the ranks of the dead. Rank after rank, regiment after regiment, ten thousand frozen men went down on one knee in the ice, all facing the same way, toward the dark shape walking slowly between them.

It was a single man in grey.

He walked across the lake as calmly as a man crossing his own garden, his hands folded in his sleeves. There was no lantern, and he didn’t need one. The dead lit his way. Wherever he passed, the frost on their helmets glowed faintly, a soft grey light like the inside of a pearl, and the light rose up off them and drifted after him in long silver threads.

In the hold beneath Aren’s feet, Freckles sat up.

He heard it through the planks. She sat up in the dark, all alone, and spoke in her own small voice, which nobody had heard in thirty days.

"He’s here," she said. "He’s come to take me home."

Then she began to sing.