Chapter 121: Do I Know You?

[Day 40 of 40.]

She came down the ridge like a falling star!

Aren saw her leave the last sledge in the convoy, a small figure in a red-brown travelling coat that he could only see as dark, jumping straight off the runners into the snow. She didn’t bother with the road, and came down the open slope at a run, half sliding, half falling, with her brown hair flying loose behind her and her hands already glowing.

Orange light, warm as a hearth.

He knew that light well. He had sat beside it on a hundred cold nights in the lower city, eating fried fish on the quay, while she complained about everything and kept him warm without ever being asked.

’Mira? Mira, what are you doing here?!’

She hit the ice of the lake at the bottom of the slope and kept running, straight toward the ship and the black wave between them. The wave was faster, though. It came across the ice in a ring of nothing, and the stern of the ship was already gone, and the people on the deck were falling back toward the bow.

Mira stopped thirty paces from the wave and threw up both hands.

The dome came out of her just as it always had, a great curved wall of orange fire, rising out of the ice between the void and the people on the deck. It was beautiful, easily the best she had ever made, wide enough to cover the whole ship, and the heat of it rolled across the ice and melted the frost off Aren’s mask.

The void touched it, and the dome simply wasn’t there.

It didn’t break or flicker, it simply went out, all of it, all at once, like a word erased from a page, and the wave came on across the ice without even slowing.

Mira stood there with her hands still raised.

He saw her understand, saw it go across her face from thirty paces away, the same face he had watched work out a hard sum on a slate when they were eight years old. Orange fire wasn’t going to be enough, and she had known that it might not be.

She looked up at the ship. At the fool in the cracked mask at the rail, with a sleeping girl in his arms.

Her mouth moved. He couldn’t hear it over the silence of the void, and he didn’t need to. He had heard her say it a thousand times, on the low wall of the training yard and in the dining hall and on the steps of the healer house.

’You idiot!’

Then Mira Hale closed her eyes, and the fire changed color.

It came up out of her white.

It wasn’t the white of snow or ice or bone. It was the white at the center of a forge, the white of a star seen through a gap in the clouds, and it had gold in it, running through it in long bright veins like light through water. It didn’t come out of her hands. It came out of all of her at once, out of her skin and her hair and her open mouth, and it went up into the sky in a column so bright that every frozen soldier left on the White Hollow turned to look at it.

Then it came down in a wall.

The void hit the white fire and stopped.

[Warning: Unknown skill detected.]

[Pyrewarden (S). White Hearth.]

[Effect: Nothing passes.]

The wave of black pushed against the fire, and the fire didn’t move. It stood across the ice like a cliff, from one end of the ship to the other and out to either side, a hundred paces of white and gold, and behind it, everyone left aboard stood on a deck with half its hull missing and stared at it with their mouths open.

The void pushed again, harder, and Aren felt it in his teeth.

The white fire held!

Forty paces out on the ice, in front of the wall, Kaela Voss stood alone on her small disc of ice, the only ice left on that side of the fire, with her lance still in her hand, staring at nothing.

And slowly, almost sulkily, the black wave drew back. It slid back across the ice, back to the empty circle in the middle of the lake, and gathered there around the white city that had risen out of nothing. It was finished, and the Rift had anchored. Whatever had come through had come through, and it was quiet now, waiting.

[Rift anchoring complete.]

[SS Rift: The Silent Throne. Status: Sealed from within.]

The white fire went out.

Mira was still standing on the ice where she had stopped, with her arms at her sides. She swayed once, and then she fell.

Aren was over the rail before he knew he had moved. He ran across the ice with the Moonlit Step, faster than he had ever run, and caught her before her head struck the ice, and knelt there with her in his arms.

She was breathing, and she wasn’t burned. Her face was pale and calm and a little thinner than he remembered, with a smudge of soot across her nose, and her hands were cold.

[Mira Hale. Class: Pyrewarden (S).]

[A price has been paid.]

He knew what that meant. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. He had made enough deals in two lives to recognize the smell of one that had just been collected.

Her eyes opened.

They were brown, and clear, and they looked straight up at the cracked white mask above her. There was no anger in them, and no recognition either. There was only a polite, puzzled curiosity, the kind you might give a stranger who had stopped to help you up in the street.

Slowly, he took off the mask.

She looked at his face carefully. At the thin cheeks and the dark eyes and the white streak in his hair. Something moved behind her eyes, very faint, like the shadow of a bird crossing a window, and then it was gone.

"Thank you," Mira said hoarsely. She frowned a little, politely, as if trying to place him. "I’m sorry, do I know you?"

He couldn’t answer her.

He was eight years old again, lying in a gutter behind the tanneries with rain on his face.

That was how this life had started. He hadn’t been born into it. He had woken up in it, in a thin, filthy body that wasn’t his, on the night the Rift opened under the east bank and took half the street with it. The boy who had owned that body had died in the flood, and so had the boy’s mother and father. Something had put a forty-one-year-old trader from another world into the empty space, and left him there with a little sister he didn’t know crying in the ruins.

He hadn’t been able to speak a word. He knew how markets worked and how to ruin a man with a contract, and he couldn’t ask for bread. People in the lower city had looked at the silent, staring boy and decided he had been knocked simple by the flood, and they had mostly been right.

Mira hadn’t decided anything. She was eight too, loud and bossy, with a burn on her thumb from her father’s stove. She had sat down next to him in the mud and pointed at things, one after another, until he said their names back to her. Bread, fish, boat, rain, sister. He had given her his fried fish on the quay the day she lost hers in the river, and she had shared hers with him all that winter. She had dragged Nell to the healer house when the fevers started, and she had slapped him the first time he stole a purse, hard, and told him she wasn’t going to have a thief for a friend.

He had stolen anyway, at first. But he had never once stolen from anyone she could see, and in the end, without quite noticing, he had stopped.

Everything he had become in this world, he had become because a girl with brown hair had refused to let him be something worse. She was the only person alive who had known him before the System, before the Academy, before any of it. She had known the boy who couldn’t talk.

And now nobody did.

’You idiot,’ he thought, and he didn’t know if he meant her or himself. ’You absolute idiot. You knew the price, and you paid it anyway.’

Then he smiled, because she was alive, and because she would have hated it if he cried.

"No," he said gently. "Not yet."

The convoy reached the shore an hour later.

There were twenty sledges and sixty riders in grey and black, with a man at their head in a fur-trimmed coat and the crowned tower on his breast. He was the warden of the Hollow trial, and he rode down onto the ice with a scroll already unrolled in his hands, ready to read out the names of the heroes of the North.

He stopped when he saw the white city.

He stopped again when he saw the twenty-three survivors standing together on the ice below the broken ship, far more of them than the Crown had ever brought home. Captain Voss stood at their front with her lance. Beside her stood a Varken heir with a bandaged head, a scout with an old map and a hard face, a dozen frightened candidates who had learned how to throw a knife, and a fool with no mask.

"What," the warden said, very slowly, "has happened here?"

Nobody answered him.

Then the fool stepped forward, unfolded a letter, and held it up so that everyone could see the seal.

"Forty days, as before," Aren read aloud, in a voice that carried right across the ice. "Let it feed, do not intervene. Bring home whoever is left standing, and record their names as heroes of the North."

The warden’s face went grey.

"Every person here has read this," Aren went on calmly. "Every one of them knows what it means. You can kill all twenty-three of us on the way home, I suppose, but you’ll have to explain to the Throne how a whole trial died in the one year it finally had witnesses." He folded the letter and handed it to Ivo. "Or you can take them home and give them their gold names, and let them decide what to say."

The warden looked at him, and then at the lancer beside him.

"Captain Voss, who is this man?"

Kaela was silent.

Aren felt her looking at him. He had promised her chains, and he had promised he wouldn’t fight, and he meant to keep it.

"His name is Ren," Kaela said at last, very evenly. "He’s a water boy from Aldermere, and there is a warrant for him under my father’s seal." She turned, so the warden and the sixty riders and every survivor on the ice could see her face. "Yesterday, something was chained under this lake by the Iron Throne. He set it free, and it walked south toward the Empire. Last night there was a lake here. Now there’s a Black Gate, the fourth in the history of the world, three days’ ride from the capital." Her voice didn’t rise at all. "He saved every person standing behind me. And he has just let two calamities loose on my country in two days. Put him in irons."

Nobody moved.

Then Sigrid stepped forward, and Jory beside her, and Tessa with her blue fingers curled into fists, and for one ugly heartbeat the survivors of the White Hollow stood between the fool and the Crown’s convoy.

"Don’t," Aren told them, and they stopped.

He walked past them, held out his wrists to the nearest soldier and waited. The man looked at Kaela, then at the fool, and finally closed the irons with shaking hands.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

[Status: Life debt x2. Unpaid.]

They put him in the last sledge with two guards, a chain from his wrists to an iron ring in the floor, and the convoy turned south off the ice as the sun went down. Kaela rode at the head of it and didn’t look back once.

He sat with his back against the boards and watched the white city grow small, and he didn’t try the chain. A promise was a contract, and he had never yet broken a contract he had signed with his own mouth.

They came for him an hour after midnight.

The guards were asleep, which surprised him, until he smelled the herbal reek of the wine skin lying between them and saw Ivo’s careful hand in it. Sigrid climbed into the sledge without a sound. Tessa came after her with a sliver of steel, knelt by the iron ring and went to work on the lock with the patience of a merchant’s daughter who had grown up around strongboxes. Jory stood outside, a grey shape against the snow, watching the camp.

"I promised her I wouldn’t fight," Aren whispered.

"You’re not fighting," Sigrid said. "We are."

The lock clicked open. Tessa slid the chain off his wrists and folded it in the straw as neatly as a blanket.

"She’ll know it was you."

"She’ll know." Sigrid’s bandaged face was very calm. "And in the morning I’ll sit beside these empty irons and tell her so, and she can do what she likes about it. My house owes you its heir, Ren, or whatever your name is, and the Varkens pay their debts!"

He climbed out of the sledge into the cold.

The camp was dark except for one small fire near the middle of the convoy. A girl with brown hair sat beside it on an upturned crate, holding a cup of something hot in both hands, too tired to sleep. She looked up when he passed in the dark, a tall stranger in torn furs walking away from the camp, and she nodded to him politely, as people do on a road at night.

He nodded back, and kept walking.

He walked off the White Hollow without a mask, without a bell, and without a name that anyone was going to let him keep.

He went south, toward the mountains and the border and the only city in the world where he had ever had a name. Kaela would expect him to run for the sea, and so would everyone else.

But there was a girl in an Academy infirmary on a hill above the river who would turn thirteen in twenty-seven days, and he had promised her a story.

’All right, then. If I can’t hide anymore, I might as well go home.’