Chapter 38: The Song

Leon’s sword came down on empty sand.

Vivienne had risen in the same motion as the falling blade, like water rising when you press down on it, and now she stood three steps to his left with the moonlight pouring into her and her silver sword lifted toward the sky.

The whole arena was glowing, and the sand around her was only the start of it. The white stone of the benches glowed, and the rail in front of Aren’s hands, and the faces of the ten thousand people in the stands, every one of them lit silver from below, every mouth open. The moon hung over the eastern hills, enormous, and its light came down into the bowl of the arena as if someone were pouring it.

Leon Harrow turned sharply toward her.

For the first time his face was not polite, and the thing looking out through his eyes was plainly afraid.

He moved like something that had never had a body before and had only just learned what one could do, every muscle at full strength at once, faster than Aren’s eyes could follow.

Vivienne didn’t move at all. She only breathed out, very gently.

What left her sword this time was a tide. It swept out from her across the sand in a single silver curve as wide as the arena, and it didn’t cut through Leon Harrow so much as wash over him, like a wave over a stone on the beach.

When it passed, Leon was on his knees.

There was no blood, and his grey armor was not even scratched. But something was coming out of him, a thread of black thin as a hair, rising from his chest into the silver air. It twisted and writhed in the moonlight like a worm pulled out of the ground, and as it rose, Leon’s face changed. The fear left it, and so did the thing behind his eyes. Suddenly he only looked like a very young, very tired man who had no idea where he was.

Then he folded forward onto the sand and lay there quietly.

The horn at the top of the arena sounded once, long and clear.

The silence lasted a single heartbeat. Then ten thousand people stood up at the same time, and the noise was like the sky breaking.

They were screaming her name, and it was not Lady Ashgrave. It was Vivienne, over and over, Vivienne, Vivienne. The silver flags waved so wildly the whole arena looked like water. In the canopied rows, nobles who had never shouted in their lives were on their feet with their fists in the air. Somewhere in the eastern stands, Aren saw the Duke of Ashgrave standing motionless while everyone around him leaped and cheered, with one hand pressed flat against his chest.

Beside Aren, the woman with the apples was crying and laughing at the same time. "She did it! Oh, the poor lamb, she did it!"

Vivienne stood alone in the middle of the sand.

She was not looking at the crowd. She was looking silently up at the moon, and the moonlight was still pouring into her. It had not stopped when the crescent left her sword. It kept coming, down out of the sky and into her body and her bones, and around her feet the white sand was turning to glass.

A column of silver light rose from her, straight up into the night sky.

At the edge of Aren’s vision a window flashed, and he ignored it completely, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

’She did it! Alone, in front of ten thousand people. She actually did it.’

He was still thinking it when the ground began to hum.

It was faint at first, a low vibration that came up through the soles of his boots and the stone under the rail and into his teeth. He had felt it twice before: at the bottom of a flooded Rift, from a stake of black iron, and in his own hands in the dark of his room, from the same stake wrapped in a shirt.

Then he heard it.

It was too low to be a sound, exactly. It was more like the feeling of a sound, a deep, slow note rising from somewhere far below the hill, from under the city and the arena and everything else. It was many voices singing the same note together, and the note was the color of the black thread that had come out of Leon Harrow’s chest.

The cheering began to falter. People looked uneasily at each other, then at their feet and the benches. Some of them put their hands over their ears, though there was nothing to hear.

"What’s that?" the woman with the apples whispered. "Love, what is that?"

Aren turned and looked down at the city.

The arena was cut into the side of the hill, and from the edge of the sand you could see over the lower rim of the bowl and out across the whole of Highcrest in the moonlight: the roofs, the river, the white towers of the cathedral.

And seven red lights.

They were exactly where he knew they would be. The docks, the merchant quarter, the cathedral, the old gardens, the north wall, the river gate, and the east bank by the tanneries.

All seven of them were glowing like coals someone had blown on. Thin red lines spread out from each one across the dark city, reaching toward each other like frost spreading across a window. They were drawing a ring around the hill, around the Academy at its top, around the arena and the ten thousand people in it and the girl standing alone in a column of silver light.

The lines met one by one. Docks to merchant quarter. Merchant quarter to cathedral, cathedral to the gardens, gardens to the north wall, north wall to the river gate.

River gate to the east bank.

Aren held his breath painfully.

’Come on, little scratch. Do your job.’

The line from the river gate reached toward the red light by the tanneries, toward the old dye house and a black iron nail with one scraped line across its runes. It reached, and touched, and flickered.

The red light on the east bank stuttered weakly like a candle in the wind.

The ring didn’t close.

For one long second, nothing happened. The low note went on under the city, rising and rising. The seven red lights burned, and the ring hung there in the dark, broken in one place, like a sentence that stops in the middle of a word.

Then the song broke.

Aren felt it go, and so did everyone in the arena. It was like a rope snapping, a rope that had been holding up something very heavy, and the heavy thing fell.

It didn’t fall on the top of the hill, on the Academy, where the ring had been pointing. A broken ring has no center. It fell where the power was, where the silver light was still pouring out of the sky into the body of a girl who had just broken through to Rank D and was burning brighter than anything else in the city.

The sand under Vivienne’s feet split open.

It opened like a mouth, a long black seam running across the glowing sand from one side of the arena to the other, and out of it came the cold. Deep-water cold, deep-ground cold, and the smell of the Abyss, the same smell as the dye house cellar and the shop on Lantern Street, only a hundred times stronger.

People in the front rows were screaming now, really screaming, climbing over the benches and over each other to get away from the seam. Up in the stands the Royal Knights were pushing desperately down through the crowd toward the arena floor, far too slowly. The commander with the scar across his throat had leaped from his seat in the noble rows and was running down the steps faster than any of them, and he was still too far away.

The seam widened.

Vivienne turned and looked down at it. The silver column around her flickered. Her breakthrough had taken everything she had, and Aren could see it in her face. She had used every drop of her strength to become what she was now, and there was nothing left over, not even enough to run.

The edge of the sand tilted under her feet, slowly, like a ship before it goes down.

She began to slide toward the black.

Aren looked at her, three paces of stone and a wooden rail away. He looked at the empty sword case in his hands.

Even if I’m dying, she had said.

But her Trial was over. She had won it. There was nothing left on that sand to break.

He dropped the case and put his foot on the rail.

’She’s my investment,’ he told himself firmly. ’That’s all.’