Chapter 87: Grimholt

It took them nine days to reach Grimholt, and Aren spent all nine of them being hit.

Tibbet threw knives at him every morning while the horses were fed. The fool who catches knives, he called the new act, but he didn’t throw like a man rehearsing an act. He threw like a man trying to find the bottom of something: ten knives, then twenty, then fifty in a row, faster each day, low and high and straight at the face, and every evening he went quietly back to his wagon and sharpened them without a word.

On the sixth day he threw two at once, and Aren caught one and fell over the other.

Tibbet studied him across the frozen field and then nodded, very slightly.

[Street Fighter’s Instinct. Mastery: 76% → 77%.]

’One percent for six days of knives? Varro was much cheaper!’

In the afternoons the twins taught him to tumble. Bree and Wren were ten years old and light as sparrows, and they thought it was the funniest thing in the world that a grown boy couldn’t do a simple back walkover without landing on his head.

"You’re so bad," Wren told him, absolutely delighted. "You’re the worst fool we’ve ever had!"

"Thank you, I’ve been practicing very hard."

He let them think it, and it wasn’t entirely a lie. Tumbling was different from Moonlit Step, a different way of trusting the ground, and it took him three days to see that the two fitted together perfectly. The twins taught him how to fall, and Moonlit Step taught him how not to land.

[Moonlit Step. Mastery: 47% → 49%.]

At night, when the camp was asleep, he slipped out alone and found something cold to feed the Familiar: a frost hare, a pair of rime crows, and once a second wolf, smaller than the first. It was hungrier every day, and every day he could feel it a little more clearly under his ribs, heavier and colder and almost awake.

On the ninth day they came over a ridge and saw Grimholt.

It was a mining town clinging to the side of a black mountain. Smoke rose from a hundred chimneys, and lifts and cables ran up and down the slope carrying carts of dark ore. At the top of the town, on a shelf of rock above everything else, stood a manor of grey stone with iron banners on its towers.

"House Varken," Mother Grell grunted beside him on the wagon seat. "They own the mine, they own the town, and they own the people in the town, more or less." She spat over the side. "They pay well for a show, though."

They set up in the square below the manor and played three nights, and on the first night Aren saw the miners.

They came to the show in their work clothes, black with dust, and stood at the back of the crowd and laughed loudly when the fool fell down. Most of them were big men, broad and tired, and on their hands and forearms and the sides of their necks, under the dust, he saw the marks: thin black roots spreading under the skin.

He fell down, got up, and fell down again, and the crowd laughed, and under the white mask he couldn’t stop staring at their arms.

It was an Abyss Mark, the kind the Headmaster had seen only twice in her whole life, the same mark that was on Nell’s arm. It was the very thing he had climbed down into the Abyss to cure, and climbed out with twenty flowers to fix.

Here, half the town had it.

After the show, he casually asked Tibbet about it while they folded the tent.

"The deep shafts," Tibbet explained. "They’ve been digging toward a Rift seam for thirty years. The ore’s good down there, better than anywhere. But the men who work it come up with the marks, the marks grow, and in ten years they can’t hold a pick." He shrugged. "Varken pays them extra for it. Most of them think it’s a fair trade, right up until the last year."

"Is there a cure?"

Tibbet laughed shortly. "There’s one, if you believe the stories: black flowers at the bottom of the Abyss." He tied off a rope. "Nobody’s seen one in this town in my lifetime. The healers sell them by the petal when they can get them, a month’s wages for a single petal, and that’s if they’re even real."

Aren went on folding the tent.

He had five lilies left in the eel-skin bundle under his shirt, two of them missing a petal each. He had given twelve to Roderick, and he had just learned that each of the five he had kept was worth more than this whole troupe would earn in a lifetime.

’I’m a fool walking around with a fortune sewn to my ribs.’

On the second day, in a tavern near the mine gate, he found the notebook.

He hadn’t been looking for it. He had been looking for anyone who knew about the White Hollow, asking quietly, as a fool asks things, with his mask pushed up on his forehead and his voice silly and light. Most people simply laughed at him, and one old miner told him to mind his own business. But a woman behind the bar, thin and grey and not laughing, spoke up.

"My husband went there, eleven years ago."

He bought her a drink, and she didn’t touch it.

"He came back, and that’s what nobody believes. He came back Tempered, not Perfect, but he came back, and he could feel the cold for the rest of his life, in his bones, even in summer." She looked down at the cup. "He died last winter in a cave-in, nothing to do with the cold. But he wrote it all down, everything he saw in there. He always said that one day somebody would pay for it."

"How much?"

She looked at him, at the fool’s cap and the painted mask pushed up on his head, and her mouth twitched.

"More than a fool’s got."

He had no money, but he had a grey wolf pelt rolled up in the back of the wagon, from a Rank D beast he had killed with his bare hands. He fetched it and laid it on the bar.

She unrolled it, and her face changed completely.

"Where did you get this?"

"I found it lying around."

She ran her hand slowly over the thick grey fur. A Rimewolf pelt, whole, with no arrow holes and no knife cuts, was worth more than a gold mark to the right buyer. He had learned that from Tibbet.

She went into the back room and came out with a small leather notebook, stained and swollen with damp, and set it on the bar beside the pelt.

"He’d have liked you," she said softly. "He always said the ones nobody noticed were the ones who came back."

He read it that night by the light of the cook fire, after everyone was asleep.

Her husband hadn’t been a good writer, and his letters were big and careful, the letters of a man who had learned them late. But he had seen everything, and he had written all of it down.

The lake, and the ice so clear that you could see the soldiers standing in it, row after row, frozen in the act of running forward. The cold that got steadily worse the closer you went to the middle, until it stopped being cold and became something else, something that ate the heat right out of your blood. And there was the stone hanging in the air above the center of the lake, the one that never fell.

Most of us went in two hundred paces and came out Tempered. Four went in further and did not come out. They are still there. You can see them in the ice, with their hands out.

Only one ever got Perfect. The young Varken, eight years ago, after I came back. They say he went in five hundred paces. They say he came out blue and did not speak for a month.

And at the bottom of the last page, written smaller and faster than the rest, as if he had suddenly remembered it at the end:

The beasts walk north before the Hollow breathes. If you see them walking, do not go in. Whatever the Crown tells you. Do not go in.

Aren closed the notebook.

House Varken had the only Perfect Marrow in twenty years. They owned this town and this mine and these men with black marks on their arms, and they had sent someone to the middle of that lake and brought him back alive.

And everyone in Grimholt knew the other thing about House Varken, because they whispered about it in the square during the show. The old lord’s granddaughter, the heir, seventeen years old, had gone down into the deep shafts last year to prove she wasn’t afraid of them, and she had come up with the marks.

Aren put his hand flat over the eel-skin bundle under his shirt.

’A dying heir, a house that knows the lake, and a fool with five flowers. Now that’s what I call an opportunity!’

Under the mask, he smiled, which he hadn’t done since the pass.